By David Heitmiller

What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago this year (2001) I was stuck on the work and spend treadmill in a corporate job that I was increasingly dissatisfied with but like so many Americans couldn't see a way out. I had bought into the "more is better" line that mainstream American culture dishes out in mega-doses. I had more stuff and a bigger paycheck than ever but was enjoying it less. I didn't have a clue as to the precarious state our planet is in environmentally or any idea of what the rest of my life should be about.

Thank God, two things happened back in 1991 that began to change all that. First, almost by accident, my wife Jacque Blix and I discovered a program called: Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship to Money and Achieving Financial Independence and second, we joined this Voluntary Simplicity (VS) study circle. After listening to the audiotape version of Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL) in the summer of '91 we decided to give the program a try and haltingly began doing the steps. In the VS study circle we met a bunch of nice people of all ages and situations that were looking for something more out of life than bigger houses, cars and useless junk. Some were also using the YMOYL program as a way to simplify and figure out what was ENOUGH. Others were long time simple livers who had great ideas on how to save, reuse and reduce our excess material baggage. In 1992 the YMOYL book came out which gave us a new burst of enthusiasm as we started to see the results of the changes we had made. I plugged away at my corporate job but behind the scenes everything was changing until finally I was able to take advantage of an exit package in early 1994. We had saved up a nest egg large enough to declare financial independence. We never looked back.

It's only gotten better since. We've written a book about our transformation, Getting a Life (Penguin, 1999) traveled around the country talking about simplicity, done YMOYL workshops and media interviews, met hundreds of interesting people, become environmental activists, changed to a mostly vegetarian diet, developed and organic garden, begun doing yoga and spent more time with our friends and family. It's hard to believe how we ever lived the way we did back then. Oh, yeah, what a difference a decade makes!

Originally posted on: www.simpleactionnetwork.tripod.com/

© 2001 David A. Heitmiller