Simple Living – Finding Joy at Home
When most people hear the term simple living, they think of flowy dresses, milking the cow at dawn and other aesthetic trends. But the truth is, you don’t have to live on a farm to have a beautiful, simple life. Simple living means cultivating an intentional, peace filled life.. and you can do it too.
In our culture today, it seems like most people’s lives are anything but simple. With the norm being full schedules, chaotic homes and people craving rest.. it’s no wonder people are drawn to the idea of a slower life.
You don’t have to have the perfect slow morning, a farm or even be a stay at home mom to cultivate a life of simple living. In this post I’m sharing 11 simple ways that anyone can do start living simply.
1. Be brutally honest about what you want your life to look like
Many times we can daydream about the lives of other people we see online, or even in real life. But when we are faced with the opportunities to take steps towards that life, we may realize it’s not actually what we wanted, or we may not be willing to make the sacrifices it takes to achieve it.
Simple living doesn’t necessarily mean you will have to make a ton of sacrifices, but it could require that. We have to take a look at the life we are currently living and ask ourselves “Am I willing to let go of these things?”.
The new car, the big house, the social status… these may be things that will be left behind for a simpler, slower pace of life if they are what’s causing you to stay in the rat race. We need to be honest with ourselves about our ideals, priorities and values.
2. Take a good look at your schedule
Living a simple life means having time for the things you enjoy, and it could be that the very schedule you have filled with things you thought would bring you joy is actually draining you. So many families today are running from here to there all day long and hardly have time for a meal together each week. Mom is rushing sister to gymnastics while dad shuffles brother to baseball and everyone stays disconnected.
Sometimes busy schedules aren’t a choice, and that’s okay. But, if you are craving a slower life.. one that has time for visiting and connecting, piddling and resting.. then that full schedule may be the very thing standing between you and the simple life you are dreaming of.
The busier the family doesn’t always mean the happier, and I would challenge you to take a step back and see whether your schedule is serving your family or if your family is serving the schedule.
3. Assess your home
So many times what we think what we need is a an elaborate overhaul to our lives. New routines, better organization and so on. But the truth is, it could be that we don’t need more to finally help us live the life we want, but actually less.
It’s difficult to feel like you are living a simple intentional life when you have too many things to manage. Every item we own takes us space in our brains, whether we realize it or not. We have to decide where to put it, how to take care of it, and so on. If we are feeling the pull to slow down and live more simply, it may be a great first step to inventory the things in our home and see what we can let go of. When we let go of things, we have more space for thinking about the rest of the points on our list.
4. Make a budget
I know first hand just how chaotic life can feel when finances aren’t in order. It can feel easier in a lot of ways not to face a hard financial situation, but the burden never really goes away.
Simple living means having a life of intentional peace, and when a financial burden is lingering in the background it can feel difficult to truly have peace. If you struggle to keep your grocery budget under control, I wrote a full blog post all about how to save money on groceries.
5. Practice the habit of staying home
One of the hardest things I had to overcome in my own simple living journey was becoming content with staying home. In our culture, it is common for a stay at home mom to call herself “a stay at home mom that’s anywhere but home”. And while there’s nothing wrong with going and doing if it fits well into your simple living goals, we need to be careful about not making a habit of escaping our homes.
When things get overwhelming, it can be really tempting to want to be anywhere but home. Anywhere where the dishes aren’t piled up, the laundry isn’t behind or the meals don’t need to be cooked. But the truth is, constantly escaping our home will only cause us to resent them more. Every time we escape, we are giving up time to tend to our homes and reaffirming the narrative in our minds that anywhere is better than here.
If we truly want to commit to simple living, we have to practice the habit of fighting through the overstimulating moments and become okay with being home.
6. Find things to delight in
Even before I became a stay at home mom, I remember having little anchors in my day (more on anchors in the next point) that truly made me delight in the life I was living.
I remember how much joy it brought me to watch the sun rise on the way to work in the morning, or the feeling of drinking a cup of hot coffee on my drive. The more we train our brains to find joy and delight in simple, everyday things, the more we will begin to notice and appreciate the other simple gifts in life.
7. Have a rhythm to your day
When the days at home are chaotic and unpredictable, it can make being there feel stressful and more of a burden than a joy. Rhythms and routines take time, but they’re worth developing. If you have young children, they thrive on rhythms. Knowing what to expect at different points of the day gives everyone predictable anchors that make being at home feel safe and stable.
Creating simple rhythms like sitting in the same spot to enjoy your morning coffee, or an evening walk as a family gives everyone a sense of belonging and steadiness. When everything in the outside world feels like chaos, home feels dependable.
8. Make your home your haven
Speaking of making home a place everyone wants to be, I think we have forgotten how important the home is when it comes to beauty and personal expression. These days, it seems like everyone views their home as a temporary place they’re just passing through. They don’t want to paint a color that isn’t neutral or put too many nail holes in the wall because they worry about resale value.
Homes used to be the place that fully represented the people there. They held all of the joy and sorrow, celebrations and grieving, the answered prayers and the not yet. But modern homes have become somewhere where people just take pit stops on their way to live life anywhere but home.
If you want to live a simple life, you’ll probably spend a lot of time in your home. Make it somewhere that you want to be, somewhere that feels like you. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make your home special. We have slowly been working toward making our home a place we love over the last 9 years on a very modest income. It’s not impossible, but it does take patience, time and resourcefulness. For ideas and inspiration check out this blog post I wrote all about how to make your home cozy.
9. Focus on one task at a time
As someone who used to take pride in how much I could get done at once, I realized that it was actually slowly killing the simple life I wanted to live. When we multitask, our brains are being pulled in so many directions that the simple joy and peace we want to have are choked out by the business of our brains.
Multitasking is sometimes unavoidable, especially if you are a mom of young children. But there are some small steps you can take to help quite your brain while going about your tasks. Washing dishes without a podcast, playing with your children while your phone is in the other room. These are just some simple ways to slow down and focus on what’s right in front of you. Your brain will feel quieter and your life will feel simpler… and the tasks will still get done!
10. Be content with less
Pursuing a life of simple living may mean that you have to let some things go, and that can be a hard adjustment. When my husband and I got married I was working as a nurse, meaning we were bringing in two incomes. When I quit my job to stay home with our son it was harder than I expected. I had to work hard to become more content (through the help of our Lord) and was able to find genuine, complete joy without all of the worldly things I had been used to having before.
Making it a priority to find joy in something that is unwavering (namely, Jesus) is one of the most important steps in living a simple, peaceful life. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-21.
11. Stop consuming, start living
In our modern culture we have access to viewing many peoples lives, or at least the parts they want to share with us. They aren’t obligated to share the less glamorous parts, but only seeing beautiful, perfectly curated parts can make someone see their very ordinary, every day life as dull in comparison.
As someone who creates beautiful content to share online, my goal is never to make someone compare themselves. We live a very real, sometimes messy, but also very ordinarily beautiful life and my hope in sharing our life in our home is to inspire others to see the ordinary beauty in theirs too.
If you find yourself feeling like your every day life doesn’t compare to those you see online, I would encourage you to get off of social media for a while and reconnect with your own beautiful, ordinary life. True simple living doesn’t mean having the most beautiful aesthetic, it comes from people living intentionally and joyfully right where they are planted.
