Do it Different

Last week the Hewitt family had a big night out, which means we stoked the fire, tromped out to the car and motored a mile-and-a-half down to the Cabot Library for a presentation.

The big show that night was by a fellow named Richard Czaplinski, a fellow of some renown in these parts for his commitment to low-input living. Richard is 72 but could pass for 55, and like most people who’ve figured out how they want to live their life and then actually lived it that way, he has a wonderfully grounded, low-key manner. I’d met him a couple times before and always liked the fella.

Anyway, Richard came equipped with a slide show (on an actual slide projector, no less; none of this fancy-shmancy Powerpoint baloney for him) and something like a half-century of experience and stories. It was, for Penny and me at least, a somewhat eye-opening experience.

By contemporary American standards, we lead a pretty simple, low-input life. We power our home on somewhere between three and four kilowatt hours per day, which is good bit less than the average family of four (29 kw/day, last time I checked). We heat only with wood, burning somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 cords per year. We cook primarily on wood, and  heat our water via solar hot water collectors and the cookstove. All-in-all, ours is a fairly “green” existence, if you’re into that sort of thing.

And yet. Here’s Richard in his 800 square-foot home, burning a cord-and-a-half per winter, existing quite contentedly on the power provided by a single 75-watt solar panel (for comparison’s sake, we have 1800-watts of solar, and still use a gasoline generator in the winter months). There are a couple of factors in Richard’s favor: First, he’s not raising children in his little house, with his piddly solar panel. Second, he has fairly recently gotten married and now lives part time with his wife, in her relatively commodious home. But that doesn’t take away from the decades he spent in his place, listening music through a car radio (so chosen because it operates on the same 12-volt power supplied by his panel), crapping into a bucket toilet, and preserving his garden harvest in the stone walled confines of his root cellar.

We’re not really interested in downscaling our lives because we feel compelled to reduce our carbon footprint, prepare for the end of cheap energy, or gird ourselves against financial collapse. Those may very well be legitimate reasons, but to me, it feels as if they are rooted in fear and negativity and I suspect if they are the only motivating factors, the path they lead to is not going to be a very fulfilling one. Instead, what we have observed is that the more we downsize our lives and expectations, the less dependent we are on the dominant money economy. And the less dependent we are on the dominant money economy, the richer our lives become and the more our sense what is possible expands. It is as if by exchanging the faux affluence of money and stuff and even some of the presumed necessities of 21st century American life, we open ourselves to an entirely different form of wealth and connection. It was probably there all along, but I’ve found that all that other crap has a nifty way of obscuring it, to the point that it’s hardly recognizable.

One of the prevailing themes and topics of discussion in our life these days is finding the correct balance between these disparate forms of affluence. I can’t pretend that money is not a motivating factor, or that we don’t sometimes wish we had more of it, rather than less. I can’t pretend to know what the correct balance is, although I feel as if we are getting closer to it every day.

There are definitely times – and this past week has been one of them – when we look around our 2200-square foot house, with all the upkeep it demands and all the shit we’ve managed to fill it with and say ”what the hell were we thinking?” The truth is, of course, that at the time, we weren’t thinking. We just did.

Don’t get me wrong, we love our place. It’s a good house, and we know it intimately, having built the vast majority of it with our own four hands. It is where both Fin and Rye were born, and I can point to the very spot on our living room floor where both of them came into this world. It keeps us warm and dry and, for lack of a better term, it just feels like home. These things are worth a lot. A whole lot.

But if we could do it over again, would we do it different? I’d be lying if I said we wouldn’t.