Simple Things - The American Dream

The other day my 13-year-old son asked me "Dad, what’s the American Dream?" This, I supposed, was some kind of homework assignment rather than his natural curiosity at work. I thought about it before answering – Freedom? – A chicken in every pot? – A Ford in every garage? – A hot tub on every deck? My final answer to him was – the American Dream is that we can live a life somehow better than the lives our parents lived.

A better life? What does this mean? More machines of modern convenience? Is the American Dream some kind of grand pyramid scheme? How can we possibly expect each new generation to top the advances of the preceding generations? Won’t it all eventually come crashing to a halt? Or the pressure to "live better" will eventually produce a generation of sleepless schizophrenics. Generation X. Generation Why.

What about simplifying our lives. We tend to just add to the cacophony of electrical wizardry in an attempt to make things simpler. There was a time, when I was in my early 20’s, when I could, and did, fit all I owned easily into the back of my car. And it was, by today’s standards, a really compact car. Was I unhappy then? No. Am I happier now? Hard to say. Or perhaps, I just don’t have time to consider it. Too busy worrying about keeping the machinations of happiness running.

Every once in awhile, my wife and I get a little nostalgic for the simple life. Now it is pretty absurd to think that a family of three kids and a dog entrenched in a way of life, can suddenly switch to the simple life. Not impossible, just unlikely. I remember being amazed, after the birth of our first child, at the amount of gear needed for one little baby. And we were living a relatively simpler life back then. We could go out for a little friendly social visit, and have the car (growing larger by the year) packed to the rooftop. Now, with three kids, we have drifted into the mini-van lifestyle. And sometimes even that is not enough.

It is the clutter that drags us down. There are stages of clutter stress. A turning point is when we finally realized that true friends would not mind the clutter. So the test of friendship became whether we bothered to do a real cleaning before the guests arrived. The next stage was to only make friends who lived in lives equal with clutter. Other families mostly.

Yet, despite a mild relaxing of our clutter anxiety, we occasionally reach a limit. One too many dirty towels on the bathroom floor, cheerios packed in the crease of the couch, junkmail piled halfway to heaven on every available countertop space. And so we attempt to simplify, free ourselves from the excesses, the clutter. Try Feng Shui, spiritual cleansing, and consumer dieting. Or bags. We put the clutter in brown paper bags and the bags in closets. Move it all to bigger bags and then out the door. Simple but efficient.

I bought my wife some books recently. She wanted books on simplifying our lives. Of course, the five new books automatically added to our clutter. Immediately she rejected two of the books. "These were written by someone who didn’t have children." A very valid criticism.

Let me tell you, I am a card-carrying cynic. Perhaps a cynic with a silver lining, a cynic with a cause, or a compassionate cynic. Self-help books don’t bode well with me. They set my cynically nose a sniffing. While I worked at a Michigan book store, I saw hundreds of self-help books come into the store, and just as many clueless people come in willing to shell out twenty bucks for an easy cure. So, in spite of my cynic’s armor, I was amazed that my wife discovered a book that in a round about way might simplify our lives. Or make the chaos around us a bit easier to accept. The book made sense. Not preachy. Not simple Simon stuff. The book is titled "Everyday Blessings – The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting" by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn. I recommend this book to any parents willing to try to change the patterns of their lives. It is not easy. I haven’t done it yet. But the opening is there. And I have the manual.

So what does mindful parenting have to do with simplifying our lives? If we lessen the stress of the complex and often cluttered routines of parenting, the rest will come easier. Inner clutter, outer clutter.

But alas, I digress. The American Dream. To live a less stressful life than our parents? To take a walk by a quiet body of water. To have the time to read a book that will teach me how to simplify my life. The American Dream. A pyramid. A dream. As my nephew Kyle says, a dream is nothing but the random firing of electrical impulses between the synapses. Perhaps. To each his own dream. As I ponder all of this, I glance at a pile of catalogs teetering on the kitchen counter. An ad for an electric back scratcher. Hmmm. We don’t have one of those yet.