Going Paperless (More or Less)

I am a writer. Consequently, I deal with words. But for the last couple of years, the words coming in and out of my life have been increasingly of the digital variety. For me at least, the paperless future is largely here. And it hasn’t arrived by accident. I have been very intentional about getting to this point.

I read the other day that the average four-drawer file cabinet contains about 18,000 pieces of paper. Based on that estimate, my wife and I had upwards of 50,000 pieces of paper before endeavoring to limit it in our lives. It didn’t happen overnight but today I’d guess that we have less than 1,000 pieces of paper.

How did we get to this point? For starters, we cut off the flow at the spout. We started banking online, getting paperless statements, paying bills online, getting off mailing lists and canceling magazine subscriptions. We scanned photos, ripped music and got e-books. We created PDFs of important documents.

My wife and I processed reams and reams of paper, from receipts to cards to newspapers to copies to printouts. Ultimately, we got rid of our printer, scanner, rolodex and every other contraption that was paper-centric. Before going paperless two of the biggest business expenses I had were for paper and ink, but no more.

Like many people, I used to print stuff because I thought I needed a physical copy. But when you go mobile like my wife and I have done you quickly realize the weight of all that paper. We literally could not travel as lightly as we do if we had not limited our paper to the essentials of tax, insurance and other necessary documents. Try it, you’ll like it.

No Rules, Just Righteousness

I was not exactly the class clown in school but I must admit I was one to flout the rules periodically and it was usually during the fire drills. I suppose I get why there should be NO TALKING during them but I had trouble obeying that rule. Yes, I was the one who got to write “I will not talk during fire drills” umpteen times when I returned to class.

Fast forward to today. The longer I live by faith the more I realize that Christianity is about Christ making me righteous, or in right standing with God, instead of me following the rules, or dos and don’ts, of religion. I don’t even consider Christianity a religion in the sense that religion is “man’s attempt to reach God on his terms” while Christianity is “God’s attempt to reach man on His terms.”

It is religion that stresses rules over relationships and rules without relationships breed rebellion. In my case, I had trouble being quiet during fire drills because I couldn’t relate how chatting with my neighbor jeopardized the success of the fire drill. And making me write that I’d do otherwise did nothing but make me try harder to not get caught again.

I happen to be reading a good book called Packing Light about a couple of friends’ journey across America. One of its messages to me is how their rule making, which usually led to rule breaking, threatened to ruin their trip. And I love this line from author Ally Vesterfelt: “Perhaps if we lay our rule book down, we could hear God whisper back: 'I’m right here, and there’s a whole big, refreshing, frustrating, and satisfying world in front of us. Will you put down your stuff and come enjoy it with Me?'”

As Eugene Peterson so eloquently paraphrased Paul’s words in The Message: “Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.” To paraphrase the words of an Outback commercial: “No rules, just righteousness.”

Our New Digs

Friends and family know that my wife and I recently relocated to another place here in historic Franklin, Tennessee but here is an update for other readers, including a photo. As has become our custom since moving toward a more mobile lifestyle, we are leasing a fully furnished apartment, complete with art and antiques, and it even includes utilities so I simply write one check each month and that is it.

Our home is a wing of the circa 1868 Miller-Beasley House and was formerly operated as a bed and breakfast called Rebel’s Roost. It has about 1,200 square feet and even includes a guestroom for overnight visitors. But the piece de resistance as far as my wife is concerned is the bathroom. It not only features a dual-sink vanity and radiant-heat flooring but best of all it includes a whirlpool tub!

Suffice it to say that we are “living the dream” and we are very thankful to God for blessing us so. It is indeed above and beyond all that we had dreamed of, and we are reminded of a passage of Scripture that states: “So it shall be, when the Lord your God brings you into the land…to give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, hewn-out wells which you did not dig…”

The Pursuit of Elegance

I realize my last post also covered a book about Steve Jobs but I just read another thought provoking one along the same lines, albeit not one exclusively about Apple, and since the movie Jobs is out I thought it timely to write about. It is titled In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing by Matthew E. May and it presented some good stuff worth sharing here.

“Apple lovers had become accustomed to Jobs’s flare for spare. They knew that minimalism, especially relating to buttons, was his obsession. The keyboard for the original Macintosh had no direction keys for the cursor. Until 2005, the Mac mouse had only one button, rather than the traditional two of most computers. Mr. Jobs had long criticized industry-standard multibutton computer mice as ‘inelegant,’” writes May.

“He had removed on/off power buttons on desktop units. He had removed buttons from elevators in multilevel Apple retail stores, along with standard retail queues and counters. Rarely if ever could he be seen wearing a shirt with buttons,” May adds. One of the striking things to me about that statement is how Jobs even applied minimalist principles to his wardrobe.

It is something I have done myself. While I often wear shirts with buttons I actually prefer ones without, such as zippered pullovers, sweatshirts and turtlenecks like Jobs loved. And whereas Jobs favored lace-up running shoes, I prefer slip-on footwear like loafers, further minimizing my dressing time, not to mention time spent going through security checkpoints.

The Strength of Simplicity

I finished reading an insightful book the other day titled Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall and it reminded me of the strength of simplicity. Segall is the one responsible for the “i” in iMac, etc. and as a member of Apple’s creative team he saw firsthand how simplicity made Apple the success it is today. According to Segall, simplicity is the “core” value at Apple and its leader Steve Jobs wielded the Simple Stick whenever things threatened to get complicated.

It was Henry David Thoreau who famously admonished: “Simplify. Simplify.” But Steve Jobs stated even more succinctly: “Simplify.” Segall says that Jobs insisted on the iPhone having only one button since one is the simplest number. He resisted creating three buttons for the functions people use the most: Internet, phone and iPod and made them front row icons on the iPhone’s home page instead. Consequently, even the silhouette of an iPhone distinguishes it from its competitors.

Before Apple’s iPhone, Segall writes, “People lived with their phones, but they didn’t love them.” But Apple changed all that. “It was technology that would make iPhone capable but Simplicity that would make iPhone lovable,” adds Segall. I have had my iPhone for several months and I must admit that I love it. Not simply my only phone, it multitasks daily as my camera, map, compass, radio, computer, watch, calculator, television, camcorder, etc. It is my all-in-one device…and that is the strength of simplicity.

Celebration of Love

Earlier this month my lovely wife, Linda, and I celebrated our silver anniversary by visiting Paris for the day. Paris, Tennessee, that is! And as the attached photo attests, we even got our obligatory photo with the scaled replica of the Eiffel Tower. While we had planned to visit THE Paris in France, we realized that with our upcoming move, perhaps it made sense to postpone those plans. So a couple of weeks before our anniversary we hatched our backup plan.

Hungry for irony, we started our day by eating breakfast at the nearby Henpeck Village Market, where the owner paid for our meal upon hearing it was our anniversary. After a scenic road trip, we browsed the quaint shops of downtown Paris and enjoyed ice cream at Café a la Mode before heading homeward. And for supper we indulged our appetite for more irony by eating at one of our favorite places, the Loveless Café.

As we celebrated 25 years of wedded bliss, we reminded each other of special times through the years and how, despite the challenges of married life, we managed to age rather gracefully by the grace of God. Of course, not having kids or pets may have helped with that! And after all is said and done, we owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the One at the center of our lives and the ultimate celebration of love.

The Stability of Mobility

My wife and I are moving this weekend for the tenth time in our 25 years of marriage and for the fifth time in the last 25 months. Suffice it to say that our last five moves have come more frequently because we have lived more freely since selling our house and furnishings in Florida a couple of years ago.

Moving is no longer the hassle it used to be and because we lease furnished places that usually include utilities in our fee we even look forward to experiencing a different place every year or so. And since our latest move is so close we are able to make it using only our mid-size sedan instead of a moving van.

As we were considering the pros and cons of our newfound lifestyle anew the other day my wife and I agreed that it has turned out even better than we had anticipated. It is incredibly liberating to live a debt-free, location-independent life and it is one we do not take for granted. Mobility has become its own form of stability and we love it.

The Story of Stuff

In about a week my wife and I are moving and, as our new home is only a couple of blocks away, it will be the shortest move we’ve ever made. But the other thing that helps make the move low stress is our shedding of so much of the stuff that makes toting and transporting boxes necessary. We can fit everything we own in a couple of carloads and love the liberty of living so lightly.

Not everyone is so inclined. According to the Self Storage Association, there are about 50,000 self-storage units in America and one in 10 households currently rent a self-storage unit. Total rentable self-storage space in America is now about 2 billion square feet or about seven square feet of self-storage space per person. That is enough for every man, woman and child to stand simultaneously under the canopy of self-storage roofing.

And an association study shows that 50 percent of renters now simply store what doesn’t fit in their homes—even though the size of the average American house has almost doubled in the last 50 years to 2,300 square feet. And about 25 percent of customers told the Self Storage Association they were storing items that they no longer need or want.

However, according to Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff, “A growing movement of people in the United States and internationally have chosen to opt out of the relentless treadmill. This approach…involves embracing a shift toward working and spending less. The focus is not on doing without, but on enhancing nonmaterial aspects of their lives, which they believe—and evidence supports—are greater sources of happiness and security anyway.” Amen.

What's In Your Wallet?

After reading Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You I was reminded how what we carry on our person speaks volumes about us. And what is more personal than our wallets? As for me, I carried a bulky Rolf organizer wallet for 20 years before switching to the much more minimalist one I carry today. My old one included several card slots as well as space for my checkbook, calendar, cash, notepad and mileage log. Needless to say I freaked out the handful of times that I misplaced, but fortunately never lost, my leather lifeline.

Once I became a minimalist I traded my walloping wallet for a simple card case handmade in New Hampshire by Osgoode Marley that I got in a cool leather goods shop when I lived on the island of Nantucket. All it contains are my driver’s license, library card, AAA card, Sams Club card, credit card, debit card, couple of cash cards and cash. It is as light as a feather and I love it. In the words of that ubiquitous, if slightly annoying, credit card commercial: What’s in your wallet?

A Moveable Feast

Whether we realize it or not we have all become conditioned by our consumerist culture to want more stuff, even though we rarely need it. And the remedy to this condition is to learn a new language, the language of less. Stuff is less likely to clutter our lives if we strive to limit its accumulation in the first place.

Asked how much consumer culture contributes to clutter, Marilyn Paul, author of It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys,” said she believed advertising’s natural outgrowth, consumption, is part of many people’s problem. “The more stuff you’ve got, the more skillful you have to be in managing it,” she said. Paul also noted that “clot” is the root of the word “clutter.”

In 1900 the average Westerner wanted 27 different things, and considered 18 of them essential to happiness. Today the average Westerner wants 500 things, and considers 100 of them essential to happiness. Greed has many faces but it speaks one language: the language of more.

The average three-bedroom house contains approximately 350,000 items. Meanwhile, the average person spends between six and seven hours a week looking for misplaced items. That translates into 312 hours a year, which amounts to 13 complete days, or almost two full weeks out of one’s life.

Two years ago today my wife and I moved out of our dream home with the proverbial white picket fence to pursue a new dream of a location-independent lifestyle and it has been even more fun than we ever dreamed. Living with less stuff has enabled us to experience life as a moveable feast and we are enjoying the menu.

Time: The Priceless Possession

I finished reading Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It by Ralph Keyes and thought I’d share some of its insights here. As Keyes writes: “One of the most basic questions one can ask in getting out from under timelock is, ‘What would you be doing if you only had six months to live?’ Those who filled out questionnaires did so.

Their answers were revealing. With half a year remaining, the most common preference was to spend time with family, look up old friends, travel, read, and write.” That is exactly what my wife and I have been doing since selling our house and stuff a couple of years ago. Living by design with an eye on eternity means treating time as the priceless possession it is.

Here is a “butcher’s dozen” [one less than a dozen] tips from The Timelock Antidote Handbook chapter of Timelock:

Develop a new sense of time…realize it is a relative concept.
Plan life, not time…get a bigger picture perspective.
Manage time organically…remember the journey is the destination.
Decelerate…slow down the pace of your race to succeed.
Modulate…moderate your lifestyle with regular breaks from action.
Reduce awareness of time…quit clock watching in favor of living.
Seek sanctuary from time…celebrate sabbatical periods of inactivity.
Limit purchases…create stuff instead of consuming goods.
Pay attention to yourself and others…prioritize time with people.
Upgrade family time…go for quantity as well as quality.
Achieve more by doing less…accept that you cannot have it all.

The Journey of a Lifetime

Journeying may be the quintessential metaphor for life. None of us can call this world our ultimate home, particularly if we believe the Bible. From Abraham’s journey to the land of Ur and Moses’ trip toward the Promised Land in the Old Testament to Jesus’ walk across the Sea of Galilee and Paul’s travels to Mars Hill in the New Testament, it is common for saints to act on their faith by journeying somewhere.

Our patriarchs’ journeys are all the more impressive given the challenges of ancient travel. Suffice it to say that to “walk the walk” of faith in those days was no walk in the park. However, aiding them in their ventures was the practice of traveling lightly. To effectively move about it was customary to only pack what they could comfortably carry on their person or, at the most, their beast of burden.

While we have much more sophisticated means of travel at our disposal today we are nonetheless left with the continuing challenge of traveling lightly through life, both literally and figuratively. Sometimes our heaviest baggage is not the luggage we carry but the emotional burdens we bear. Yet armed with the type of faith our forebears used to blaze trails before us, we also can reach our own promised lands.

A friend recently shared with me that a famous Brazilian photographer, Sebastiao Solgado, spent time traveling with the nomadic Nenets who move their reindeer herds hundreds of miles each year to seasonal pastures. Solgado reported that “I learned from them the concept of the essential...if you give them something they can’t carry, they won’t accept it.” It would benefit us all to consider what “the concept of the essential” means to each of our journeys.

Keys to Simplicity

It is funny what inspires you sometimes. I was sitting here at my favorite café minding my own business when a fellow with a giant ring of jangling keys walked by and inspiration hit me. When I heard all those keys I couldn’t help but think of my own keychain and how little noise it makes.

All my “keychain” consists of is a key fob to our push-button car and a single key to our apartment. That is it. Gone are the days when I carried multiple keys to the multiple doors of our house and the multiple vehicles we owned. One home, one vehicle and one key…I love it. And the truth is, we could probably leave our door unlocked but we don’t.

It got me thinking about how else my wife and I have streamlined our stuff. As minimalists we strive to pare our possessions down to what we consider for us at the time to be “an irreducible minimum.” That is often a moving target but it is a target nonetheless. And it has become a pastime for us to see how little we can live with.

While we presently live with a total of less than 500 things between us, there is no magic number to which we feel we must whittle our things down. It is more a matter of what fits our current situation. Since signing a one-year lease for our present place we’ve picked up a few extra things we left with our parents and that is okay.

But if the situation called for it, we’d simply shave stuff off our list by asking ourselves what we wouldn’t want to live without. There is nothing like the need to fit all your stuff in a mid-sized sedan on moving day to motivate you to live with less. Ultimately, the keys to simplicity come down to what fits your lifestyle and what you love to live with.

Changing Times

With the recent time change to daylight savings time and the changing of seasons to spring it has made me mindful of changing times and seasons in my life. As my wife and I went through our closets the other day for a regular pruning [as minimalists “spring cleaning” is year round for us] I tried on my last suit and while it was still in fine shape it didn’t come close to fitting mine so I donated it to our church’s benevolence ministry.

To appreciate what this means, I need to share a little backstory. I hadn’t worn a suit in several years and I gave away the last of my ties to a friend more than a year ago [don’t ask me why I had a suit and no ties]. But once upon a time, I owned half a dozen wool suits and a dozen silk ties, including a bowtie and pocket squares for special occasions. I even had my dress shirts dry-cleaned and pressed, a fact that seems comical to me now.

Even before leaving the corporate world a dozen years ago to start my own communications business, dress down days were morphing into dressy casual wardrobes, so suits and ties were on their way out. However, before that I was an ordained minister who actually enjoyed dressing up [unlike most guys I know]. All of which is to say that times change and we need to change with them. And so I am making another change.

I have been very selective about joining online social networks over the years, limiting myself to Shelfari, which I quit after a couple of years, and LinkedIn, but a couple of days ago I finally joined Twitter. My epiphany came upon reading leadership guru Michael Hyatt’s Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, in which he attributed the building of his personal brand largely to Twitter.

In sync with this blog, I tweet about my musings on the art of life and other cool stuff @SeanFowlds, so be sure to visit me there also to get more timely, nugget-sized notes and quotes about lifestyle design issues like simplicity and minimalism. And consider joining me on Twitter if you are not a member yet. You can follow me and others whether or not you post tweets yourself.

Living With Less

My mother-in-law died the other day and so we just returned from another round trip to Florida for her funeral and here to Tennessee for her burial. All of which has served to remind me of the relative brevity of life and our relationship with stuff during our lives. One poignant reminder came with my wife’s request for, and receipt of, her mother’s wedding ring. It was the only thing she asked for and her father and older sister graciously agreed to it.

While in Florida, my wife and I offered to help her father start the process of going through his wife’s belongings but he was not yet prepared to deal with it and we understood. The good news is that once the time comes there won’t be that much to process since my mother-in-law was not one for owning lots of stuff. For as long as I knew her [more than 27 years] she never cared much for accumulating the things of this world. Her focus was rather on the spiritual side of life and I admired that about her.

On the very day of my mother-in-law’s burial there appeared in The New York Times an op-ed by Graham Hill titled “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” and it really resonated with me, especially in light of recent events. As Hill stated, “Intuitively, we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.” Hill, a successful entrepreneur who happens to live in a 420-square-foot studio in New York, summarized: “My space is small. My life is big.”

I’ve never seen a trailer behind a hearse and life is brought into stark relief when you stare into a pit dug about six feet deep and truly realize that “you can’t take it with you.” During the funeral for my mother-in-law, my wife reminded us all to keep life in its proper perspective: “Live like today is your last; love like there is no tomorrow; and laugh like you have no sorrow.” Amen to that.

Searching for Mayberry

Maybe we’re chasing an illusion, but I don’t think so. As I write this, my wife and I are trying to decide whether or not to stay here in the Nashville area or to continue “searching for Mayberry.” I originally wouldn't have thought of our journey in such terms but upon closer reflection I must admit that we are indeed on a quest for the type of community depicted in the popular television program.

The other day I read that a local author likened where we live here in Franklin to Mayberry and I had to agree that it comes as close as anywhere we’ve lived to date, and we’ve lived in some pretty cool places by anyone’s account. Whenever we mention living in such places as Savannah, Georgia and Celebration, Florida and Nantucket, Massachusetts and Franklin, Tennessee people act incredulous.

And we’ve not only lived in cool places but in cool spaces within those cool places, right in the heart of the historic districts of each. Suffice it to say that a sense of place is very important to us and we love living within walking distance of cafes and other so-called “third places” apart from work and home. But it is other people that we most desire to connect with and that part has been somewhat wanting in our experience.

While my wife is typically more sociable than I am we are both pretty outgoing and even though we have no trouble meeting and making friends it seems that people are often too busy to maintain friendships nowadays. And while we can’t necessarily turn back the clock to bygone days of yesteryear we are striving to live counterclockwise on our journey toward a kinder and gentler pace of living. We crave community and connection.

Entering the 21st Century

Sitting here at my favorite local café I am reveling in the ability to do what I do, namely write, using the latest technological tools available. For the record, I only upgrade computers about every half-dozen years so I relish using my state-of-the-art MacBook Air laptop, which weighs just a couple of pounds and is capable of truly amazing stuff.

But the piece de resistance of my high tech arsenal is my new iPhone 5, which my wife and I gave each other as Christmas presents last year. Even though we actually attended the MacWorld convention at which the original iPhone was unveiled in 2007, we had never taken the plunge and gotten one ourselves.

Now that we are armed with what has been called the best smartphone made to date we feel as if we have finally entered the 21st century. For the entire past decade we simply used a couple of Nokia prepaid phones and they suited us just fine but I looked forward to getting an iPhone one day and that day has come.

The above setup is not actually mine but a representative photo I got online that not only features my laptop and cell phone but also my external hard drive [tethered to the laptop]. The camera pictured is a Nikon and mine is a Leica but they look similar. With a computer, cell and camera, I am good to go. All I need to do now is renew my passport.

Living by Design

As I celebrate my birthday today I am mindful of the tagline on my blog: “musings about the art of life.” And I recently came across the approximate French equivalent: l’art de vivre, or "the art of living." If anyone knows how to celebrate life it is arguably the French and with our twenty-fifth anniversary rapidly approaching my wife and I are planning to experience the French lifestyle firsthand by paying them a visit this summer.

What impresses us so much about the French style of life is the emphasis upon savoring each day as it comes and enjoying the simple pleasures of life, such as a leisurely meal, a stroll in the park or a visit with a loved one. Since I am self-employed I indulged myself today by spending time away from the home office, including a steak-and-egg breakfast at a new bistro and a lunch of soup with baguette at one of my favorite cafes.

Due to the inclement weather here in our area I wasn’t able to take a stroll in the park today but I am enjoying a nice supper at home with my beautiful, young wife and savoring the simple life. Whether we realize it or not, such days are more available to us than we think, if only we will strive to live by design rather than default. It only takes a little thought and planning to make a day memorable and special, birthday or not.

Of Hearth and Home

As yet another year draws to a close I am reflecting on what a huge year of transition it has been for my wife and me. At this time last year we were enjoying a welcome sabbatical on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts for the winter before an ill-fated attempt to relocate to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area, where we were nonetheless able to sell a couple of vehicles of ours that had outlived their usefulness.

And as regular readers know, come spring we headed to Florida to gather some of our belongings from family before returning halfway here to the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee, which we love. Since moving here we have renewed our appreciation of hearth and home, as we moved every six months or so before signing a year’s lease of an apartment in an historic building in downtown Franklin, which includes a fireplace, albeit a closed one.

To help compensate for the lack of a working fireplace I downloaded an application [complete with crackling sounds] for use on our computer and we visit our local Cracker Barrel on cold days to soak up the ambience of their fireplace. It has been fun placing our stockings and Christmas cards on the mantel during the holidays and otherwise celebrating this most festive time of year. We are thankful to be closer to family and friends nowadays and welcome the return to our southern roots, not the least of which involves good old fashioned homestyle cooking, even if not over a fire.

Living the Dream

It has been some time since I blogged due to our busy slate of holiday activities but I had to post today because we got our first snowfall here in Franklin. Snow is only covering the ground but it adds a festive touch to our already joyous holiday season. It has been such fun celebrating the holidays here that it has reminded me how very much I am “living the dream.”

The holiday festivities kicked off earlier with Historic Franklin’s “Dickens of a Christmas” street faire, complete with costumed characters from A Christmas Carol playing live at the circa 1937 Franklin Theatre. And speaking of the theatre, on Christmas Eve my wife, Linda, and I saw our favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, at the theatre and we return on New Year’s Eve to swing to the sounds of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

It is so awesome being able to walk downtown to the different cafes and shops and soak in the ambience of an old fashioned Christmas. We recently invited friends to visit our circa 1930 home in the historic district and to join us for a stroll downtown to the festivities when one of them exclaimed, “This is so romantic!” And it was just last year that another friend of ours remarked, “Your lives are like a movie!”

So perhaps we could describe our experiences as being like a dreamy, romantic movie? Whatever the description, Linda and I frequently feel the need to pinch ourselves to remind us of how blessed we are to live in such special places. As regular readers will recall, it was just this type of lifestyle that we envisioned a couple of years ago when we placed our house for sale and our dreams in the hands of the One whom we celebrate.