simplicity

I look around me and see a lot of unnecessary things cluttering my space. I have a Palm, a cellphone, and an iPod Nano. Of the three, only the cellphone is useful, and although both the Palm and the iPod are gifts, the money used to buy them could have paid for three months' rent in the house, with something left over to buy a month's worth of groceries. Sayang.

I have seven pairs of shoes, and a couple of them have not been used in the last four months or so. I have a black blouse bought in May that I haven't had any occasion to wear yet. Sayang.

There are ordinary women like me who will sound horrified at having ONLY seven pairs of shoes; most of my friends have at least a dozen. I have friends who have bottles of unused perfume, blouses still with price tags, bags bought last Christmas but still unwrapped, jewelry.

I have always hated superfluous things. I hate things going to waste, or things in excess. I guess I can get by with very little because I was brought up having 'just enough.' It was my grandmother's rule of thumb. Get just enough food on your plate so you won't waste it, followed by the immortal 'A lot of children in Africa are dying of hunger...' Another pair of school shoes? No, the old one is perfectly serviceable for one more school year. In her house I grew up with three pairs of shoes: one black, for school; rubber shoes for running around and P.E. classes; and one pretty pair to go with the dresses for church on Sundays. My grandmother would hoard imported corned beef, socks my uncle sent from the U.S., Tupperware, blankets. The dolls were kept in the cabinets in their unopened boxes because, of course, the kids had just enough toys to keep them busy. I had a Rainbow Brite doll sent by the aforementioned U.S.-based uncle for Christmas when I was in third grade. I stole it from the toy cabinet when I was fifteen and took it to Manila when I studied in college. When I went home last year for my grandmother's funeral, I found an Avon lipstick, still sealed, that I gave her about a year before she died.

I don't like knick-knacks, figurines, sculptures, and artificial flowers in vases. They are not useful. Which is probably why my efforts at decorating the house have been pathetic at best. I have bought a lot of home-improvement magazines, but I cannot imagine spending 4,500 pesos for a lounge umbrella, or 600 pesos for a blue glass vase. If not for the nanny, we probably would not have a dining set or a living room set. She bought them and I paid her back. I keep on meaning to buy new curtains, but I reason out that we still have perfectly serviceable ones. I also say that it's partly because the house is not truly ours, but as the nanny says, it's not as if we're moving out anytime soon. We lived five years in the house in Sta. Clara and we barely filled one-third of the moving truck when we moved to the house in Cavite. I don't have pretty bedsheets. My sister who lives in a rented house that's only one-fourth the size of ours has a cabinet of matched bedsheets and is planning built-in wall shelves.

My husband is also a simple man, so I guess we're lucky to end up with each other. I have nothing against pretty things, expensive things, or a dozen pairs of shoes. I sometimes give in and buy new books when I could hunt them down in secondhand bookstores. I only think sometimes that it really takes little to make a person happy, if one learns to be thankful for what one has. I will not be a hypocrite and say that I always think of the hungry children in Africa. I feel that living within my means, knowing when it is just enough, is enough to keep me all right. I can now afford a car, but I don't HAVE to buy one.