Living the good life
I read Helen and Scott Nearing's The Good Life about a year ago, and the
part that really stuck with me was their daily routine. The
back-to-the-land couple divided each day up into three segments ---
four hours laboring to bring in their food and money, four hours on
intellectual work or the arts, and four hours socializing or working in
the community. The duo clearly found a balance that suited their
bodies and souls, promoting a sound mind in a sound body.
When you look into the
Nearings' lives a little more, though, you'll discover that the four
hours of "bread labor" was mostly spent on the farm. "Although they budgeted
carefully, did grow a lot of their food, worked
hard and didn’t spend much money, it was banks, stocks, annuities,
monetary
gifts, inheritances and unearned income from other people’s labor that
kept
Scott and Helen going," noted Nearing neighbor Hay Bright.
I didn't really like their
division of time anyway --- as an introvert, the mere notion of
spending four hours a day talking to people gives me shivers.
Instead, Mark and I have developed our own system, spending half the
working day (three to four hours) using our bodies on the farm and the
other half of the working day using our minds on the computer, either
working or blogging. Throw in a day every week or so spent
visiting friends and family, and a weekend of leisure, and you have our
version of the good life.
Most modern Americans
have a hard time finding balance between the physical and the
intellectual in their lives. Either they work forty hours a week
at a physically exhausting job and come home too tired to do anything
except collapse on the couch, or they spend the same amount of time
flexing their brain muscles and then try to cram all of that pent up
physical energy into an hour or two of exercise per week. The
newfound balance in our current lives is one of the biggest reasons I
advocate microbusiness independence to everyone.
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