40 Days of Mindfullness

My life is a little crazy busy at the moment, but I watched our president on Tuesday night, and one of the things he said struck me as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I agree that we need to concentrate far more on our children's educations and on healthcare for all of us. I agree that we need to help people climb out of the problems that they have--financially, socially, physically, educationally--and improve the life of each and every citizen of not just the country but the planet. I think he's got some great ideas that warm the cockles of my heart.

But then he said this: "...the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy."

Why? Why does it have to be that way?

I understand that 99% of us cannot afford to buy a house with the money we have on hand, and I agree that probably 50% of us can't buy a car outright either (at least not without jeopardizing other bills and life requirements). That's investment, as far as I'm concerned. Credit, to my mind, is something that you get because you can't afford what you want, not what you need. If I really want an iPod but don't have the money to buy it outright, putting it on a credit card is no investment of any kind, as it provides no usable equity (though it does make it easier to listen to the presidential address podcasts).

So credit is one thing and investment another. You should have what you can afford and save for what you can't.

It's unfair, however, to expect that to actually be the case. Our capitalist economy has been built on spending money whether you have it or not, and the industries we have are simply designed to work on money that is loaned: You loan the bank money by opening a savings account; the bank loans Bob money, and Bob pays Jimmy (who employs Ken and John) and buys materials (which employs some other people) and eventually gets paid off by Max (who borrowed his own money) and pays off the bank which then pays you off in the form of interest.

So, I guess credit is the lifeblood of our economy, but coming to that realization requires me to rethink my definition of "credit" to include investments like those described above. Is it possible to live without credit (using my original meaning) and still get what you need? Yes. It just requires that we all rethink what the definition of "need" is, as well.

A human being needs, minimally, food, water, shelter, and clothing. Which sounds pretty minimal indeed. But if I go to Spago and eat foie grae and oysters, wash it down with imported bottled water from Italy, go home to sleep at my penthouse apartment in Central Park West, and wear Armani while doing it, I've got the basics, haven't I?

There are people in the world who need those particular basics. If you're not one of them, you must just not be watching the right TV shows, because all the admen are telling us daily that that or something like it is what we need to have.

I'm not saying you have to give up your iPod (you'll pry mine from very angry hands), but I do think we should all spend a little time finding out what the definition of need is.

For Christians, the season of Lent has just started--40 days of reflection and penance. Instead of just celebrating this Lent as a Christian holy season, where the most many of us will do is eat fish on Fridays, I'm going to invite anyone and everyone of every faith and none to join me and give up thoughtless spending for the next 40 days (or thereabouts).

Here's how I, personally, am going to work it:

• I am going to try not to eat out for the entire 40 days. If I do eat out, I will consider the source of the food, the plates I eat with, and the social and emotional benefit I get.
• I will try to spend the least amount of money on my food and minimize the packaging with which I'm willing to deal (luckily, lots and lots of things come in bulk now).
• I will not buy anything on impulse--each magazine, candy bar, and online music purchase will be considered and acquired in a mindful way.
• I will keep track of each and every cent I spend, without guilt or remorse for the entire 40 days. Easter week, I can take a look and see if I can find places to cut more out of the needless acquiring.

So? Who's with me?

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

Living more frugally when in debt or overshoot is a sane and moral choice. The more of us who make this choice, the faster the collective transformation will go. We are at a crossroads. Disaster is not inevitable, but we need to change.
--Vicki Robin
Learn more about Your Money or Your Life and the Financial Integrity movement

I hate change.

Seriously. Change is exhausting and scary and difficult and I don't like it one bit.

The fact that change brought me the love of my life, a new place to call home, and maybe even some sense of peace (sometimes) is really quite beside the point. Change sucks.

But change is the only way to live--each of us is conceived, is born, lives, and dies eventually of something. It's all change.

Now, you can try to make change less painful in an awful lot of ways. You can work as hard as you can, sacrificing everything in the pursuit of something to make the change "worth it"--accrue tons of money so that you can always "have enough" and never have to worry. You can concentrate on saving the world--spend all your time sacrificing for the greater good; stop eating meat, fruit, whatever is the environmental baddie of the day; stop using plastic, aluminum, steel, wood, air; stop using the internet, the television, the car, the bike, your shoes--making sure that future generations can enjoy the earth (because you didn't).

In other words, you can try to take control of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation, hoping to make yourself feel safer.

But the truth is, you'll never feel safe, and I'd posit that life isn't about feeling safe anyway--at least not in that way. Life is about living, which is one of those hopelessly hokey things people put on bumper stickers, but it's true.

The problem with life being about living is that everyone has a different idea of what "living" entails. Is living having a fancy car and a fancy house and eating at five star restaurants every night? Is it acquiring as much "stuff" as you can get, so that you can say "I have enough to live on if everything collapses"? Is either of these ways of life fundamentally wrong--or right--for anyone and everyone?

The world itself will eventually make this determination for all of us. Currently, we as a species are living like we've got four or five spare planets tucked away, just waiting for us to pull them out of mothballs once we've used up the resources on this one. I found it interesting that the hundreds of thousands who jammed the Washington Mall to watch Barack Obama advocate change and a turning away from childish things managed to leave 120 tons of trash in their wake. This is not change I can believe in.

Eventually, the world will stop us itself. Crops fail every year, for a variety of reasons, and we look to technology to stop these disasters. We engineer crops that withstand a certain plant virus--then grow hectare after hectare of them, making them vulnerable to some other plague. We create new pesticides to stop this plague, killing off beneficial bacteria whose job it is to keep plague #3 in check. We "reintroduce" said bacteria to the soil, further disturbing the balance... It goes on and on and eventually, the earth is going to win and we're not going to be able to grow anything on that land, because it just plain needs time to heal.

We do much the same with every resource we have, but here's a thought: What if we, for starters, used less resources? This is not to say that we don't actually need to feed the billions of people on this planet, but what if we decided that we didn't need lemons from Florida in the dead of winter in the northern midwest (and yes, I'm talking about myself here)? That would mean less gas used to get the lemons from there to here, less monoculture in the agriculture landscape there, and more support of the farmers here in the midwest, who grow a mean winter cabbage and a variety of other winter greens that will satisfy my vitamin C requirements admirably.

What if, instead of using acres and acres of farmland for endless crops of corn to be used for ethanol, we instead stopped driving quite so much? Less driving, less ethanol, more room for food crop. And what if we as consumers were a bit more diverse and discriminating in our choice of foodstuffs? The farmer who once grew only one type of corn on his 150-acre farm could now grow five or ten different crops, rotating his crops in and out of each field and increasing the growing power and stability of the ecology of his own local soil. At the same time, he'd increase the nutritional content of the local diet and make sure that people could satisfy themselves with local food, using fewer food miles and coming back full circle to driving less, using less ethanol/gasoline/electricity, and improving the local agriculture.

No Impact Man posted a blog entry recently in which he commented that "we [environmentalists] should joke around more." I love both the cartoon and the sentiment. Because the flip side of the ethical and environmental snarl I've just written about is the joy of living well.

Now, living well can definitely mean spending $300 on one meal for two (say, your Valentine's Day blowout). I'm not into spending that much for a meal, myself--but don't ask me how much I spend on the mortgage to my beautiful condo on the beach. I spend my money on housing, because I "need" to see the water. Which is also living.

Living well can also mean spending a rainy day inside on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Heck, you don't even need to have bought that book--that's what libraries are for! Now, you can think about where that tea came from, where the cup came from, where the library got the book and how much, ecologically-speaking, it cost to make it, or you can just let go of your eco-guilt for a minute and enjoy the fact that you have a roof over your head and a good book in your lap.

And the next day, maybe you can remember how nice that day was--a day when the most consuming thing you did was, maybe, turned on the stove to heat some water and the light to see the print when it got dark, and think "maybe that's a good way to live more often than not."

Maybe buying your child fewer toys and offering him more attention is a good way to live. Maybe making a homemade meal with local foods you never even knew your area had is a good way to live. Maybe walking to the store that's only a mile away and not buying more than you can carry home is a good way to live. More often than not.

And if that change in thought--and change is hard--saves some money, or some resources, or some stress... Then maybe change doesn't need to suck quite so much all the time.

______

Today, you get an ecological link, just because it's Friday!

• A Skyscraper Grows in New York City: The Vertical Farm Project is researching the sustainability and feasibility of building high rise gardens in metropolitan areas. The result could be a decrease in average food miles, a greater connection between the city dwellers and their food, and even the possibility of farms that not only supply their own power and water, but give some back to the community, as well! This project is, in my mind, the next building I want shooting up in my backyard!

What exactly is the cost of living?

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
--Anita Koddick
(Donate a mosquito net at Nothing But Nets and help prevent deaths by malaria)

People talk about the cost of living. They talk a lot about how people the world over are farther in debt than they've ever been, how people are living far beyond their means, how if we all just bought only what we could afford, we would all be stronger and more financially secure.

So let's look at that. For example, here's a typical day's food for me when I eat at home (we aren't factoring in the days I visit Starbuck's in the morning and a local Italian joint for dinner):

• breakfast
  1 cup Special K cereal (approximately 50 cents per serving)
  1/2 cup skim milk (~ 50 cents)
• Snack
  1 apple (organic, so $1)
• Lunch
  Usually a stew of some sort, with meat ($4.50-$8.00, depending on the meat and the vegetables chosen)
  1 cup berries and plain yogurt ($1.50--not a pre-made fruit yogurt, but fresh fruit and nonfat yogurt)
• Snack
  1 oz. chips (50 cents if you buy a bulk bag of chips)
• Dinner
  4 oz. meat ($1, less if it's on sale)
  1 cup green beans ($1 [organic again--pricey])
  1 cup roasted potatoes ($1.50 at least)
• Bed time snack
  1/2 cp. ice cream (50 cents)

Added up, that day's food cost me about $14. Now, I do spend the extra money to buy organic food and I do buy brand names and as you'll notice, I do eat meat (working on that). I suppose if you didn't you could probably buy all of that for about $9. Maybe. If you had the time and place to cook. That also (because I do count calories and buy lowfat foods) all came to 1450 calories, which is a little less than a normal-sized woman my age and height should eat to get her entire day's worth of vitamin and mineral requirements.

I make considerably more than $14 a day. I can very comfortably afford to eat all of that and keep trim and keep money in my pocket. I can easily live within my means and still keep myself nutritionally stable.

The US Census defines a single individual (termed "unrelated individual") living below the poverty line as one who makes just over $10,500 a year. A family of four living below the poverty line makes only twice that, not four times that.

$10,500 a year works out to $28.76 a day over 365 days. So, my meals for an average day would take half of that person's salary if he or she lived here. If you financially slimmed down that menu to $9, it would still take about a third. So, little money left for housing, clothing, anything...

Yes, you can eat more cheaply in a metropolitan city such as this one. You can. The menu can be varied to some extent, but the basic truth is, living within your means when you have little in the way of means is extremely difficult. Let's not talk about the fact that, even if you are in dire financial straights, a single person who actually has a place to rent, will get no more than a maximum of $150 a month in food stamps--half what it would cost to buy all that food. And to get that maximum, you have to beg--because you don't feel like life is hard enough for you already!

Now, I get this information from the US Census and my state's department of human services. I cannot discuss living within your means in the vast areas of the world where people live on less than a dollar a day because I do not know how much things cost there. I couldn't even tell you what it costs to live in New York or LA or Denver. I only know here. And they say you should write what you know, so...

What I can say is that things like soup kitchens and food pantries and aid organizations do a lot more than just give a handout. If you work a minimum wage job (current federal minimum wage in the US is $6.55) for 40 hours a week, you make, after taxes, approximately $10,900.00. Imagine raising two kids and supporting a spouse (who has to be stay at home whether he or she wants to or not because you can't afford the $400.00 a month minimum daycare that one child costs, much less two) on a wage that means one day of 1450 calorie meals for one person eats up a third of your daily income. And remember that that doesn't include days you have to take off because you're sick (because you probably don't have paid days off) or days the company is closed (because you don't have paid holidays) or the days you're not slated to work because the company just can't employ you full time. And if you and your spouse can figure out a way for one of you to work nights and the other days so that the children are taken care of, does that really make things better? Yes, you'll get more food on the table and the chance to keep the table, but is that a marriage anymore if you never see each other?

Aid from social community-based nonprofits help preserve a little dignity and a lot of family--if the aid is available.

So here comes that part I was talking about in my last post where I say there are things you can do.

Educate yourself:

• Read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. It's an interesting experiment of a woman, who normally makes quite a lot, taking off a year to work for minimum wage. (At least she can go back to her paying job and the royalties she makes off her books.)
• Check out the US Census Household and Individual data by subject index--or your own country's census bureau website. It's full of very interesting and eye-opening information.
  

Use yourself:

• Call your local church or look in the phone book for a community food pantry. Ask if they have soup kitchen days you can volunteer at. Ask if they have enough people to help keep the pantry stocked and organized. Ask if you can donate just a couple of hours a week--even less in some places is a help. My local church does a sandwich Sunday the third Sunday of every month, when people can come in between services and make bag lunches and give them out to the homeless and needy people who live around the area. It's a great way to do something to help change things, and it requires about an hour a week of your time.

Use your means:If you have money you can donate, there are tons of people who will help you get it to the right people.

• Share Our Strength is a group devoted to helping feed underfed children in the United States. They even have some fun things like The Great American DineOut, which allows you to raise money for the charity simply by going out to a fine restaurant.
  
• Friends of Man is a charity that is completely volunteer. 100% of the money you donate goes to people who need it to pay their rent or their medicine or their food. Grants are small and specific, so if you are one of those who believe that giving money to charities is bad because the money never makes it to the people who need it, this may be a good place for you to look.
  
• There are tons of other groups who will take your money, of course, but I think a good way to spend that money is in your local community. Even the richest areas have homeless and poor people and people who are struggling to get by. Call your local social support groups, and I'm sure they'll help you figure out how you can help in your local area.

_____

Meanwhile, here's your human rights link for the day, brought to you by Amnesty International:

• Struggling for Women's Rights in Somalia: A Q&A with Zam Zam Adbullahi, a human rights activist in Somalia, the capacity building officer for Coalition for Grassroots Women Organizations (COGWO), and the Chairperson of the Somali branch of the African network for prevention and Protection of child abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN).