Before our term started as Service Adventure leaders, Daniel had an idea. He called it "Simplicity Challenges," envisioning a weekly exercise in which we as a household draw a slip of paper from a jar and receive instructions for a challenge for the week. He and I both believe in living simply: pursuing social justice, conserving resources, and modeling our own lives in a way that moves us toward a better, more sustainable, and more loving world.
So we brainstormed some challenges (mostly about resource use, but striving for a variety) and, when the time came, broached the idea with our participants. Some of them were a little hesitant at first, but they're a pretty happy, adaptable, willing-to-try-things sort of group, so they agreed.
We drew our first challenge during a house meeting several weeks ago, and we've been doing one every week since. We've had quite a few interesting experiences as a result -- here's a glimpse into that aspect of our lives together.
Week 1: Save water by limiting shower time. We had to decide some parameters for this one, and we came to the consensus that everyone was allotted 21 minutes of shower water for the week, to be used at any time. This works out to 3-minute-long daily showers. For people like me who don't shower every day anyway, this wasn't a huge stretch, but I still challenged myself to pare down my time and in the end I only used 16 minutes.
Week 2: Fast from a meal. This was probably my favorite challenge so far. I've done a lot of short-term fasting in the past (one year for Lent I fasted from lunch once a week, and I've done two or three 24-hour fasts) but I hadn't done one in a while. For some of the girls, though, this was their first experience with fasting. So this was a good opportunity to embrace our abstinence from a meal in favor of remembering those who lack adequate food, and reminding ourselves about the many things that sustain us other than food.
Week 3: Save your trash. We decided on a 4-day stint for this one, and we each carried a ziplock plastic bag around to collect all the trash we each produced. It was an interesting experiment, and it helped that we compost and recycle quite a bit, so as a household our trash output is fairly low. Still, the exercise provoked a few obvious attempts to avoid trash (like when someone left about eight Cheerios in the box rather than finishing them and having to save the bag). I was pretty happy that my quart-size bag wasn't stuffed by the end of the week, but obviously I can still do better next time.
Week 4: Save fuel by walking or biking instead of driving a vehicle. We talked for a while about how to do this one, since Franzi drives the van to work every day, our church is about 6 miles from our house (and I had agreed to play violin in church that week), and we had Friday night plans in a neighboring town about a 30 minute drive away. Eventually, we decided that we would attempt to walk or bike any trip that was within 1-2 miles. This was pretty easy for all of us, since that's sort of the default approach we each take anyway. Anna, Sarah, and Anali all bike about a mile and a half to work every day, and Daniel and I love to travel around town by bike whenever we're able. However, the challenge did result in one instance where the six of us walked somewhere we might have otherwise driven, so we'll call it a success.
Week 5 (the current week): Save electricity by turning off lights after 9 pm. Unlike some of the previous challenges, this one was met with enthusiasm right from the start. (I think it helps that our housemates usually go to bed around 9:30 on weeknights...) So at 9:00 every night, we're sporting headlamps, flashlights, cell phones, and candles. It's nice, in a way.
After we complete a challenge, we've been putting the slip of paper back in the jar, so repeats are inevitable. (And, if I remember right, we only have a total of about eight or nine different challenges in the jar.) If you have an idea for a future challenge we could incorporate, I'd love to hear it!
