For example, one day I decided that I didn't care to buy overpriced, chemical-laden laundry detergent anymore, and I that I didn't want to lug jug after plastic jug of it back to my house several blocks on foot (as we don't own cars). I bought borax, washing soda and pure soap from the hardware store and dissolved them together with water to make a detergent gel that costs, oh, maybe $.01 per load? I haven't found any fault with it.
My colleague recently described to me how his wife outfitted every window in their sprawling suburban house with Hunter Douglas shades and window treatments in one fell swoop. I was both intrigued and repulsed by the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a houseful of shades that a thousand, ten thousand people have in their homes. Most people in the western world don't realize that they don't have to purchase what fashion and advertising dictates they should want and have.
They can make it themselves, more beautifully, more creatively, more healthfully, more effectively. This is my vision of the ultra modern home.
I find that people I know who came from poverty-stricken nations to find success in North America are behind in their development, although I understand why. They are preoccupied with the idea that now they can afford to pay for the things they need and desire to be prefabricated for them. They have separated themselves from the handmade and don't value it, as it symbolizes to them a lack of resources and waste of time. I have watched in fascination and mounting depression as a newly-rich acquaintance of mine from southeast Asia designed a lavish mansion and hired housekeepers and maids to ensure that his wife, a stay-at-home mom, won't have to lift a finger to manage anything, including their only child, and has the dubious freedom to spend all of her days at the spa.
I can't tell you how many friendly but heated arguments I've had with a Pakistani friend about the value or lack thereof of being self-reliant instead of spending money and resources doing things like hiring housecleaning companies and buying disposable cutlery. He sees organizing, cleaning and domestic creation as detracting from what life should be - an endless swirl of bars, hookahs, lounging in the park, picking up women, deciding whether or not he should read a book, etc. He dreams of finding a sweet, intelligent, serious, modest (and yet tantalizingly wild) young woman to marry, upon which he anticipates showering gifts and attention to the point where she doesn't want for anything. He would foresee every trouble and protect her from anything that would threaten her pristine spoileditude. He knows that she would adore being cradled within his bubble of love, protection and funding.
As his expansive description came to its naive close, I told him that I would hate it. Hate everything about it. He was taken aback. Why? How could anybody hate that?
Because the struggle, the yearning, the self-reliance, the self defense, the resourcefulness, the self-proving and self-discovery is what life is all about. He pretends not to, but I can tell he's listening to me, an attractive, well-educated Swiss/Dutch blonde woman from the US, and meditating about what his society and his culture have taught him.
I am worried that we are losing our yearning, our self-reliance, our resourcefulness and the inherent individual creativity that we all possess. "Proving oneself" has become a meaningless and empty race towards excess and pointless, embittered competition.
And thus, last weekend, I finished my roman shades and made my own Marseilles soap with a jug of sodium hydroxide, olive oil, coconut oil and water. It is beautiful, but it will be too soft yet for the next couple of weeks.
