Tomorrow is the start of Lent and even though I wouldn’t say that I follow the Christian festivals, I do unwittingly follow them and if I didn’t use Lent as a time to give up things I am not happy with for a short time then I’m not sure I would ever get around to it.
Last year was the first time I gave something up for Lent and I gave up wheat as a main ingredient which I found interesting and rewarding, I would have never have thought that wheat saps your energy levels so much and don’t know when else I would have made the time to say “I’m doing this” if Lent wasn’t handerly marked on the calendar with a start and finish date.
This year I am going for it again and giving up or changing;
Facebook – When everything is said and done I just don’t trust facebook or the way it collects information or continually trys to trick you into passing it on and have often found myself sitting staring at the computer screen thinking “this is boring” and still not switching it off. I can see how it could be used for good but it can also be used for boring mindlessness and an excuse not to live in the real world. I would love to say I was leaving forever but I do use it for keeping in contact with people, many of whom I would have lost contact with completely if it weren’t for facebook, and I even enjoy some aspects of it but I do want to remind myself that there was life before facebook and that the world won’t end if I don’t log in…
Keeping to my hours at work – I love my job and want to be as good as I possibly can be at it but I also know that if I didn’t have to work I would be happy enough without it and that I am only doing so to support my ‘real life’. Being good at my job doesn’t mean working all hours and fitting in my ‘life’ around that, there is a balance that can be had. So I am giving up that extra hour/few hours work each week that belongs to my ‘real life’ and maybe even doing nothing with it… I do understand that there will be some flexibility in it as both my work and ‘real life’ are unpredictable but somewhere in the middle I will be making the two meet… Somehow.
Shampoo – When I first moved I vowed to only keep bicarb, oats and vinegar in my bathroom cabinet but then found that I just had half a bottle of this or half a bottle of that to use up and then Rhys’s father and step-mother gave us a bag of half bottles of shampoo from the B&B they run and since the New Year this has been all I have been using and the bicarb, oats and vinegar haven’t even made it through the door out of the kitchen. My hair has gone a little bit funny since moving into a house with central heating so I shall carry on with my six-week conditioner treatment but WILL be giving up bottled shampoo and going back to using my homemade mixture of bicarb, cider vinegar and old tea. I so much want to understand what and how the things that I buy are made of and feel like I have control over what I am really bringing into my house but when it comes to things like shampoo I have no idea what the list of ingredients are and I’m not completely sure I can be bothered to find it out but I can choose the limit what I don’t understand and try to find alternatives that I have a grasp of. And that is the reasoning behind shampoo
A Life Less Simple 