Learning the joy of living with less

From the New York Times, http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?emc=eta1, this article about how little our lives’ happiness depends on ready cash.

The Joy of Less

By PICO IYER

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

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An obvious answer

It’s an obvious answer, and therefore will not be tried. George Ure asked, Saturday morning, in his urban survival site: www.urbansurvival.com

“THE problem of the new Obama administration is this: How can the US (and for that matter, the whole civilized world) both find meaningful jobs and at the same time increase consumption of goods and services, so that we ‘bottom out’ and turn this economy around?”

The answer is obvious enough.

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