Jim McGuinness
Originally posted by Times News Kingport, September 24, 2006
In 2000, Sam Jones was the epitome of corporate success. A computer programmer and helpdesk manager in Columbus, Ohio, the mother of four daughters had nearly everything she could want in her professional career. The only thing lacking was a sense of fulfillment.
“It wasn’t a midlife crisis,” said Jones, who now lives in Harmony, in Washington County, Tenn. “It was awareness that I’d worked hard and had all the accoutrements of being successful – the big house, the big car, the furniture. But for some reason, I wasn’t happy.”
Jones vowed to make changes in her life. Then, in the middle of some soul searching, she found out about a course called Voluntary Simplicity that was being offered at a local church. The course was geared toward people with a desire for a slower-paced life, thus giving them more time to spend on personal relationships, connecting with nature and the pursuit of non-monetary goals. Since those were the very things Jones was looking for, she signed up.
At the end of the course’s eight weeks, she had completely bought into the notion of voluntary simplicity (also known as simple living).
“I finally had a name for the kind of lifestyle I wanted to live,” she said. “It gave me a real good foundation to start a new life on.”
In January 2004, Jones and her husband, Michael, took the idea a step further by founding the Voluntary Simplicity Group of East Tennessee. The group meets at 7 p.m. on the second and third Thursday of each month at Holston Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Gray, offering courses on a number of topics pertaining to simple living.
“The foundation is to figure out how much is enough,” Jones said. “How much is enough energy, enough time, enough money – all of those things. And when you can figure that out, I guess you can say your life is simple.”
The next course, titled “Exploring Deep Ecology,” will be held for nine sessions beginning Sept. 28. Focused on the Green philosophy, its goal is to help people understand their personal role in preserving the Earth’s resources.
While a workbook is used, none of the courses is “taught” in the traditional sense. Each meeting has a facilitator responsible for keeping the conversation on topic. Everything is otherwise done by consensus. In addition to talking about various aspects of simple living, the group might go on daytrips, watch documentaries or visit the homes of various group members. They’ve also formed a food co-op.
Deep Ecology is the flagship program of Northwest Earth Institute, an Earth-centered volunteer group that seeks to motivate individuals and organizations to protect the Earth. Based in Portland, Ore., the group has developed a series of programs in which small groups of community people meet to examine personal values and habits, engage in stimulating discussion and make personal changes if desired.
Among those courses is Voluntary Simplicity, an eight-session program that addresses the distractions that keep us from caring for ourselves, our relationships and our environment.
Changes can be small, such as starting a garden or getting excessive clothing out of your closet, or larger, such as embracing solar energy in your home.
“The reasons that people come into the course are all over the ballpark,” said Dick Roy, who co-founded NWEI with his wife, Jeanne. “Thousands of people have gone through the course, in general, because life is complicated. They want to slow things down.”
A Harvard Law School graduate, Roy practiced corporate law in Oregon from 1970 to 1993. Meanwhile, his wife worked as an activist on air quality and solid waste issues. In October 1993, he resigned his job to join her as a full-time volunteer.
Their early objective was to take Earth-centered programs into mainstream workplaces where people would meet for noontime discussions.
“We wanted to demonstrate that the workplace could be a place where people meet with a sense of purpose and have meaningful discussions,” Roy said.
As the course began to spread throughout the state, local groups were soon meeting outside the workplace. The NWEI now produces courses on Voluntary Simplicity, Deep Ecology and four other discussion topics: Choices for Sustainable Living, Discovering a Sense of Place, Globalization and Healthy Children/Healthy Planet.
One of the goals of the NWEI courses is to build small communities of people that emphasize human relationships – something Roy believes has become lost in today’s high-tech world.
“The average 18-year-old now spends eight-and-a-half hours a day interfacing with an electronic device,” Roy said. “That’s eight-and-a-half hours that otherwise would have been used in some other way. In general, the electronic world is very isolating. It alienates us from other humans, and it alienates us from the natural world.”
The idea of voluntary simplicity is hardly new. The book “Voluntary Simplictiy,” written by Duane Elgin, was originally copyrighted in 1981. While its subtitle, “Toward a Way of Life That is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich,” suggests toning down consumer spending, Jones says the concept extends further.
“I really thought, when I took the voluntary simplicity course in Columbus, it was all about being frugal,” Jones said. “That is the core of a simple lifestyle, but it’s so much more than that. It’s not about clipping coupons.”
In the case of Jones and her husband, simplicity includes everything from hanging their wash on a clothesline (they don’t have a dryer) to heating their house with wood. They also grow most of their food in their garden, do a lot of canning and preserving, and make their own bread. The couple recently got an eight-panel solar cooker that works as alternative to a regular stove.
“In my daily life, I’m very aware of energy,” Jones said. “We do many things because of the environment and our concerns about the lack of oil. But it also gives us a sense of satisfaction that we are able to be self-sufficient in some small way.”
Group member Jim Small is also energy-conscious. He and his wife, Anne, moved into their current home in Church Hill after relocating from upstate New York in January 2002.
They are partners in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Green Power Switch, a program that promotes renewable energy. The Smalls have 30 123-watt solar panels on the roof of their house that enables them to generate electricity that they sell to the TVA, which in turn sells electricity back to them.
“We planned when we moved here to do a number of different things,” Small said. “One was what kind of energy we could produce ourselves.”
Small, who has been involved in voluntary simplicity since the early ’90s, recently took delivery on a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, a small, all-electric pickup truck capable of speeds of up to 25 miles. Restricted for use on roads with speed limits of 35 miles or less, the vehicle enables the Smalls to do their local shopping and errands without using gasoline.
“We just use electricity, which we make,” Small said. “We can drive all the way to Kingsport without using an internal-combustion automobile.”
Kingsport resident Sharon Brown joined the group two years ago as a means of finding better ways of using her time and spending her money.
Brown says she feels the impact in how she approaches shopping.
“Now I shop more purposefully,” she said. “I don’t go shopping unless I have a specific reason.”
Since joining the group, Brown says she’s also cut back on watching TV. Besides giving her more time to do other things, the move has enabled her to save money.
“My cable bill kept creeping up, and I thought, ‘This is crazy,’” Brown said. “So I cut back to basic cable which is less than $10 a month. I’m saving $500 a year.”
Group member George Cross lives in Kingsport with his wife and two teenaged sons. A geochemical engineer, he relocated to the area from southern California 12 years ago.
“We came here to be in this environment,” Cross said. “We like the natural beauty, the smaller population and the slower setting.”
While relocating helped Cross decelerate his life, he’s been slower to embrace the simple living concept than most other group members.
“My life is quite hectic now,” Cross said. “I’m probably the opposite of simple living. I admire some of the people in that class because they’ve made conscious choices to simplify their lives. I like learning some of those concepts. The more I learn about it, the more I see myself going in that direction in the future.”