Returning to a Simpler Life

My husband is Italian and has always known how to celebrate life.  From him I’ve learned it too. Throughout our marriage we’ve celebrated all the little milestones of our lives and our children’s around a table, eating a meal with extended family and friends: nursery school graduation; dance recitals; the end of pewee baseball, you get the idea. It all makes for fond memories, and in some ways reminds me of a simpler time.

But so much has changed from those years. Life has become hectic. Our expectations have become so high.  We want so much that often we find it difficult to enjoy what we actually have. This is what a niece of mine thinks.  The other day she began recalling all the great times our family had growing up; she meant the extended family, which was considerable—aunts, uncles, cousins. She spoke of the Sunday dinners at Grandma’s where we had the same meal every week: a dish of pasta, breaded chicken, some vegetables and a salad. She recalled how the cousins would play all day without benefit of TV or computer games, but using their imaginations, instead. And how the highlight of the day came when the ice cream truck arrived outside the house and Grandpa would line up all the kids and buy them something.

She’s a professional now, holding down a full time job and loving her work, yet still laments that her generation’s children may not have what she had.  She thinks perhaps the economic downturn will force a return to the simpler life; that as discretionary income shrinks, people may have to consider more simplistic pleasures.

I think she may have something.  I’m a firm believer that good can come out of every adversity, and in keeping with that thought perhaps our economic woes will create a new spirit of contentment.  John D. Rockefeller, one of the world’s richest men, was once asked, “how much money is enough?” His answer, “Just a little bit more.”

For too long we’ve been a nation of wanting just a little bit “more”. Perhaps now is the time to see that we already have enough.  Perhaps now is the time to be content and celebrate life by enjoying the simple pleasures, and enjoying them with gratitude that our God has, in reality, given us so much.

Until next week,

Sylvia