When I left Europe for a long trip through Asia, it was my first time in Orient. I was picturing Asia as a highly spiritual, quiet place with incence burning everywhere, monks in every street and pagodas at every corner... I was slightly wrong... Instead I found excessing noise, traffic jams, entire malls of electronics... and also a Man and a job in the diving industry.
We have been living in Thailand for now 5 years, and that same desire of spirituality and simplicity I was after when I left is still there. We got trapped in a new routine, 9,500km away from home, got ourselves jobs that are even more demanding and stressful than the ones back home, so I decided it is about time to do somerthing bout it. Yes, that’s it, I have been reading and thinking about this for ages, now I have made the decision : I want a simpler life.
I have always made up excuses for not doing so sooner : I don’t have time but as soon as this project is over I will; there is no good gym around here, but as soon as I find a good one close by, I will go; you know these ones already, you have used them... My personnal favourite (I have used it for years...) is, I live in a country where it is too difficult to be eco-friendly and watch what you buy (amazingly enough here, everything is written in thai, which makes it a little more difficult to figure out where your products come from and what’s inside !), but we’ll leave soon, I’ll start then ! Mind you, we have been talking about leaving Thailand for more than 3 years now, and we just signed up for another season... ;-)
However, I have to say there are some advantages in living out here. We don’t own a TV, we don’t really have access to newspapers or magazines, and we don’t really have time to listen to the radio or read the news on the internet. So we are not all that polluted by the medias that are hiding so many things from us behind the screen of the news and the advertisments. I was watching yesterday the story of stuff (http://www.vimeo.com/storyofstuff), and Annie Lenoard was mentionning this amazing fact : today people in America see the same number of ads in one year than their parents in their whole life in the 50’s... Isn’t that crazy ??? Of course we are not completely consumerism free, and I have to confess that I just spent 120 USD in a brand new ipod. Well, I have been wanting to buy one for over 6 months, and everytime I am at the shop, I in extremis manage to resist the urge and go home without, convincing myself that I don’t need it. Sure I dont NEED it, but I really wanted a new one : not because my old one was too old or out of date, just because it was just too small to keep all my music in there... Anyway, last time we went to the shop, I resisted again, but as I was leaving the electronics section, I saw that new ipod 5th generation 2,000b cheaper than the regular price... So I bought it. The idea to get a bargain was stronger. To be honnest I do use it a lot, and we can’t really call this an impulse spend since I have been resisting for so long ! Plus my boyfriend is really happy because he got my old one !
Anyway I do enjoy the fact that I am shopping in local shops and at markets (although it can be a tedious process because out of the 10 items on your shopping list, you will probably find 2 in each shop, which makes the shopping sooo much longer) and not at malls where you cannot avoid the adds and where the temptation is everywhere. But, like I said, I miss being able to read labels and ask the shop person where the products come from (I know my thai is ridiculously bad, but even if I was fluent it would not make any diffrence because they wouldn’t know - they are not really concern about all this just yet...). I also miss being able to buy clean household products and cosmetics (not that I use so much make up over here, but you know what I mean...).
Anyway, I have decided to start doing something about this. I don’t axectly know what just yet, but the plan is to figure it out soon. There are a lot of internet material and keys in hand solutions out there, some more attractive than others (I don’t think I am ready for the 100 things challenge just yet, I would rather start smaller and work my way towards less and less stuff... http://www.guynameddave.com/100-thing-challenge.html), and I particularly like the 6 changes for 2010 (http://6changes.com). However, I do plan to do some more research on all these very usefull blogs, and then hopefully come up with my on plan. This blog is my attempt to figure it all out, and my probably the story of my strugles along the way...
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