When checking my email this morning, a Yahoo! news article caught my eyes - 21 Things We're Learning to Live Without. On the one hand, I'm glad to see that someone is writing about this, showing us *shock!* we can live without Cable, fancy cell phones, and multiple car notes. And are people really willing to use the space in their home to allow a non-family member (or even more difficult, a blood-relative!) to live in their home and share the cost of living? Surely this cannot be!
On the other hand, I can't help but wondering why it took us so long. Why did we ever think we needed to fill out lives with crap? Just because our affluence allowed us these things, we felt the obligation to indulge. And now...
But who are we kidding, if our economy does bounce back, won't we go right back to our same old habits? "Buying" things we can't pay for (debt), huddling our little family in a big house (privacy), and padding our lives with insurance policies, alarm systems, and private schools (security +).
What might we learn from all of this? Could we move beyond being "forced" to cut back and actually realize the deep joy in disconnecting from technology and discovering the joy of human connection? (Matthew Clark has lots of thoughts on this) to cooking simple, good food? to sharing things that aren't really ours to own anyway?
Could we?
What some of us have sought all along, is now becoming... more common. And to that I say, praise be to God, our provider and creator of all the joy we're re-discovering in human connection!
