Rash Vows and Beautiful Grandchildren: Rash Vow #1

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Rash Vow #1 - the Compact

Okay here I go! I began 2008 wondering about my spending habits and consumerism. I was out of sync with Bill who is trying to figure out how soon I can be retired to part-time work and more time with him (so he is in the "pay off all debt - how much do we really need to live" mode.) I, however, was in the "height of my career so I can finally buy what I want" mode. Then I read the following on my son-in-law Greg's blog: Best Rash Decision: Years ago I read an essay by GK Chesterton entitled "A Defense of Rash Vows" and I have occassionally tried to make rash vows so that I might intentionally keep them. This year's rash act was my favorite of all time (probably, though Andrea Bailey's refusal to buy me Coke is a close second). In a rash move I decide to read all of the Harry Potter books, and I managed to do it in a week. This is a spectacular series of books, particularly when you read them in one shot. The growth in the characters and in the writing are phenomenal, and the seventh installment was superb.

So in the back of my mind was that making a rash vow once in awhile is good for you. It is kind of like shock therapy. I realize that I spend too much money and I want to honor my husband and be in sync with him - so I was really ready for an article on the front page of the Mpls. Star Tribune on January 8, 2008 titled - "Could you go a year without buying anything new?" (I am sorry the article can't be retrieved since only articles within the last 14 days are available for free. I have a copy if you want one.) It described a growing movement in the US started by a group of 10 friends in the San Francisco area in 2004 as a rebellion against what they saw as "gluttonous consumerism and its thoughtless destruction of the environment". They made a pledge which they called The Compact (after the creed made by the revoluntaries sho sailed to the US on the Mayflower) in which they would buy nothing new for a year except for a short list containing food, beverages, medicine, underwear and cleaning products. They all found that their year of not buying anything new was life-changing.

This seemed just the ticket for me. So I waited for the 4 days until I went home to tell Bill. I wanted to make sure I was really going to do if I took this "rash vow." I thought and prayed about it and made the following list of how I would control what I spent the most on. Bill was very encouraging about this and we feel much more together on money than we have in a long time. I have enjoyed two paychecks of having money left from my discretionary fund - it is a relief!! We are now actively planning when we will both be retired from full-time work (not for at least 3 years but who's counting!)

You will notice that a couple of food items made it to my list as I was also convicted about the number of plastic bottles of water Bill and I use (even though we religiously recycle them) AND my habit of Starbucks/Caribou Coffees stops for the largest of the latest flavor of course with whipped cream on the top. (When did my brain shift to accepting paying over $4.00 for sweetened cup of coffee?!) One area NOT explained in this article was if you can still make handmade items and garden. I am going to assume YES since they are definitely not into consumerism (sewing and knitting should be okay especially using currently owned supplies) and planting perennials and transplanting pine trees is good for the environment.

Here is what I spend the most on and will not be able to buy new for a year:

Books - Borrow from Library/Friends, Re-read all my old favorites which will take a year anyway!
Starbucks Lattes - Just ask for a cup of hot water and use my own tea bags which I like better anyway and used to be so proud about doing and never having to pay for.
Gifts (The BIGGIE!) Since I love to give my kids and grandkids many, many presents this is a big one. I have already figured out their birthdays for one year and at least Colette's next birthday present. I will give my kids money for gifts and ask if they would consider honoring my pledge not to buy anything new.
Bottled H2O - drink my good well water!
CLOTHES - (The other real BIGGIE!) - No new this year period!
Junk Food - Okay with The Compact but not for me if I want to live as long as Bill!
Decorating Items for my home including holiday decorations - Okay how many times do I really have to redecorate. I can live on my purchases from just 2007 for awhile in this catagory (AND in the clothes catagory.)
Sisters' Reunion Purchases - Nothing new this year. I spent so much more than everyone else - they were looking for things for me to buy! No more vicarious spending through Laura this year! I can buy at Antique or Used items stores. I will save a lot of money on this one!
Photos - Will use up my vast archives and catch up with scrapbooking before I print 2007's end of the year and Christmas photos.
New Casual Winter Coat - I have wanted a new casual winter coat for a couple of years. My current one is 7 years old (bought it in Canada when visiting Abby and Greg the winter before Josh was born) and it has a broken zipper and I really don't like the velcro straps to close it. Instead, I am going to remove the zipper and straps and have bought some cool buttons to sew on after I make new buttonholes with my sewing machine. Here is a picture of the coat I was going to get rid of:

I will put another picture on when I have rehabbed this warm coat. Bill says he is really proud of me for this one since it is something he would do - trying to wear something longer and not just buying something new!

THINGS I THINK ARE OKAY TO BUY BUT I WILL STILL USE UP OLD SUPPLIES BEFORE BUYING ANY NEW:

Computer Ink and Paper
Scrapbooking supplies
Yarn and Fabric
Flowers especially perennials

So this is my first rash vow. I have already gone almost a month without buying anything new except for the buttons for my old coat (which I hope is okay!!) Hey - it is my rash vow!! I will blog my adventure, where I am tempted, where I already see changed attitudes. I already love doing this!! More Later.

2 comments:

MJ Krech said...: Wow! Way go go, Laura! I'm so impressed with your RASH VOW! You have made a worthy Compact. Mom would have loved this and supported you with daily phone calls, I'm sure! Sarah wrote a speech one time called, "My Grandmother, the First Recycler." Raised during the Depression, Mom saved and mended and reused and recycled old things as a matter of necessity. Seeing her daughter take this concept on as a matter of choice warms my heart. I'm not ready to make a similar vow, but you can be sure I'll be following your progress this year with great interest!

You go, girl! I'm proud of you!; February 3, 2008 at 7:50 AM
christian said...: Wow Mom! So glad you're doing this! (The compact and blogging)Encouraging, challenging, and faith building not only for you but also for us reading and watching.; February 3, 2008 at 12:55 PM

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The Inspiration for the title of my Blog - What is a RASH VOW!

A Defence of Rash Vows by G.K. Chesterton An abridged version of a chapter in Chesterton's book The Defendant.
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization -- by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged.
'For he that lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.' And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us -- this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief of love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum aere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow.
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- 'free-love' -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.
It is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterlizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasure of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.' Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: 'Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love the free-lovers say: 'Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.'
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
©1997, The American Chesterton Society

Rash Vows and Beautiful Grandchildren

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Saturday, February 2, 2008

Rash Vow #1 - the Compact

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