As Baby Draws Nearer, A Focus on Simplicity

When I lived in the Galapagos Islands, my possessions—outside of the bicycle I borrowed from my friend Elizabeth—fit into two bags.

With my boyfriend at the time, I rented a little apartment on the top floor of a three story house owned by my landlords Mary and Diego. We paid $100 a month to live there and from the balcony outside my apartment’s front door, I could see the ocean as well as most rooftops of my neighbors around me. I would sit up there smoking cigarettes, drinking Pilsener grandes and patting Titi, their beautiful soulful gray lab. I cooked on a small hot plate, and I did laundry at Elizabeth’s house down the road.

This was 2008, and for the seven months I spent there, I happily and peacefully lived without a cell phone. When I was looking for my best friend Nini, I had as good a chance of going to our favorite spots to hang out and calling her name to find her as I did approaching it in any other way. I would say the odds were 50/50, which isn’t bad.

The highest dramas were battles with the cockroaches we lived with and battles with the parasites that lived within us.

In short, life was simple. Not easy necessarily—we pedaled our bikes everywhere, struggled to find clean water and the power went out with high winds—but simple, yes. And I liked it—I liked that I was able to battletest the notion that one could live simply and prove to myself it was possible. When I read Kevin Kelly’s article “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice” I found myself nodding along to one of his 68 bits:

When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.

I knew exactly what he meant. I knew what it was like to go without shade, ice cubes, Internet, general comforts, and I have to say, it has made me both appreciate all of those creature comforts more and convinced me of how little we truly need to be happy.

I’m thinking of this intensely at this time because our baby is set to arrive any time now and my goal is to keep life very very simple for us, especially at the beginning.

Keep baby alive
Love the baby
Recover
Be nice to Nick
Feed baby
Clean baby

These are six things—six very simple things—that are not necessarily at once easy things when one is sleep deprived, has been torn open and is functioning as a milk maid, I imagine.

I have removed “learn the piano” “learn Russian” “learn how to cook 50 meals elegantly” from the list of to dos that I inevitably carry into every year. Outside of these six short term goals, I have a couple others for the year that are also very simple but the name of the game is to keep it focused and to keep my expectations very, very low.

In a world where we have a knick knack for everything, ten million Google search results for “cat memes” and ten opinions for every quandary, I just want to keep it quiet and simple—get our groove as a family, enjoy our time together, play, be well.