Ennui: thoughts on purpose for a new year

Snowy countryside seen on my first run of the year!

Blah. Ho-hum. Same old, same old. Here we go again.

That’s been my general attitude toward life in this first week of 2016. Okay, so I don’t ever actually use the phrase “ho-hum” in my everyday thoughts or speech, but the others are all accurate.

Does anybody else feel this way every January? That post-holiday slump, when you don’t have so much to look forward to and everything seems dull and drab? All fall, I anticipate Thanksgiving and Christmas and the long break from school. Vacation is wonderful, I get to spend more time with loved ones, I get to relax and read and go to the movies. Then, all too soon, it’s a new year, the ball has dropped, and it’s time to get back to regular life.  Back to work, back to scheduled activities, back to normal. The letdown is not quite so strong as when we were kids, and the day after Christmas we felt like we would never have fun again. Nevertheless, the struggle is real.

As a new year begins, I often find myself dragging. Not in all things, of course, but there’s just a sense of…I don’t know…sameness? It’s like I know there’s this new year with all these new possibilities, and that’s great, but so many things in life don’t change, and it makes me feel almost trapped.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am INCREDIBLY blessed (we can debate the true meaning of this word another time, but for now, I think it fits best). Life is amazing. My two boys are challenging, but oh so adorable. My husband is awesome. We have good jobs, loving families, a safe home, and we’re taking control of our finances finally.

But.

A sense of ennui has set in. Lorelai Gilmore defined it as “a lazy, soon to be out of work French concierge who won’t answer the phone”. For those of you who didn’t learn this word from Michel Gerard on Gilmore girls, it’s actually a feeling of weariness and discontent. It’s not even for anything specific. I just get this feeling sometimes, as if I’m missing out on some big secret. Like I’m supposed to doing something so much more dramatic and impressive with my life. Anybody understand where I’m coming from at all?

I feel like we’re ready to finally take the leap of moving out of state, getting us closer to Nate’s family and lifelong friends, but every year, something keeps us anchored where we are.  Every time a school break or maternity leave ends, I contemplate staying home for a few years with the kids, but here I am, back at work yet again. We love to travel and can’t wait to return to France as well as explore other countries, but having two very small children doesn’t make that kind of travel super-appealing at the moment.

It’s okay if these things stay the way they are. These are by no means problems. Yet I still long to do something about them. I’m longing for change. I’m stuck, in a sense, and not sure of how or when to be brave and get unstuck.

Many of us are struggling through the first week of New Year’s resolutions. I chose not to “officially” make any this year (meaning I don’t have a list scribbled down anywhere of the things I hope to accomplish). I always have some hopes of change in my mind, though. I realize this is not the way to accomplish anything (you’re supposed to make SMART goals–specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound). So I’m setting myself up to fail already.

Where am I going with this? I guess I want to say that if you’re experiencing a bout of ennui, this sense of boredom, take heart. You are not alone. Perhaps this season of wondering, of waiting, of uncertainty in purpose, is exactly what we need to get us to where we want to be. After all, how can we seek change unless we know what’s wrong with the status quo? Don’t we need to feel the confusion and disillusionment and uncertainty before we figure out what needs to change?

I’ve been aching to put pen to paper (or fingers to I-Pad) for over a week now, wanting so badly to express something, but unsure of exactly what it was. It’s frustrating to think of the ways I fail as a parent, the harmful things I eat, the stories I haven’t written, the time I waste, the goals I haven’t reached, and not have a concrete plan of how to fix all of it. Maybe there are just too many areas in my life that need an overhaul. I can’t focus on all of them at once. Maybe the change I need right now is simply in attitude.

Maybe it’s all right to experience a bit of ennui from time to time. It’s totally human and natural. We can’t be on top of the mountain all the time. We go through seasons of struggle and seasons of achievement. We have to go through the valleys as well as the plateaus. Not to mention all the hard work that goes into actually climbing the mountain.

Just the two of us:)

God is with us whether we’re trying a different career path or staying put. He’s with us whether we put down deeper roots here or or move to a different city or town. He’s with us whether we feel successful or not.

But I’m not going to quit searching. I know there’s something out there for me, for us. It’s within reach.

Perhaps a trip back to the Centre Pompidou is in order?

Holiday ramblings

Christmas is coming!

One of my fave Christmas-season activities is watching all the classic holiday movies, plus every Christmas episode of fun sitcoms (Friends, The Office, and such).

The man of the house makes fun of my penchant for watching shows I’ve seen a dozen times before. I personally like seeing them again, especially when there’s a holiday theme. Gotta love those Office Christmas parties!

The other night, after the munchkins were both asleep, since their daddy was working late, I put on an old “Everybody Loves Raymond”. It was the Christmas episode in which Ray gets Debra an expensive new cookware set in an attempt to get in her good graces, so she’ll let him go on an extended golf weekend with his buddies.

Lo and behold, on Christmas morning, Ray also gets a special gift (I chuckled when I saw it was–get this–a DVD player! Remember when that was a big deal?) He loves it, but the joy is short-lived as his brother and dad convince him that his wife must be manipulating him with a big gift. He’s expecting a lame tie, but that’s not what he gets. Darn, now his gift is equal to his wife’s in extravagance.

Anyway, a fight ensues (shocker) as Ray accuses his wife of bribing him with a nice gift, and she of course is insulted and offended because she had no ulterior motives in her giving.

Watching the familiar scenes, I breathe a deep sigh of relief, so glad that I’m not in a relationship dependent on presents to prove our feelings. We’ve never attempted to manipulate each other by spending or not spending a certain amount of money.

For us, our newfound commitment to a more frugal lifestyle doesn’t really change the way we’ll spend the holidays. Special occasions have always been rather simple for us. We don’t go out on Valentine’s Day, we don’t give birthday or anniversary gifts, and we don’t even really do Christmas presents. Yes, in the first year or so of dating, we did the gift-giving routine a bit, but since then, we’ve agreed that we really do not need presents.

We don’t need gifts to prove anything. We don’t need gifts to enjoy the holidays or other milestones. We don’t care about how much the other can spend on us.

All we need (really, all we want) is to be together. Does it sound cliche? Yeah, maybe. Who cares if it is? It’s the truth. We love each other and we love our family. Neither of us feels less loved if the other doesn’t buy just the right gift.

Giving has always been more spontaneous for us. If I see something cool with a Star Wars theme (hubs cannot wait for the new movie coming out on December 18), I might get it just because I know how much he loves Star Wars. When he recognized that I would love having a Kindle, even though I resisted it, being a “real-book” enthusiast, he went ahead and got me one that Christmas. I don’t expect that expensive of a gift for every other occasion. He doesn’t get offended if I don’t buy him a present for his birthday, but I did get him a Tardis mug and this nifty t-shirt as a congratulatory gift for finishing his doctorate.

What this does for us is make us more creative, more aware of one another. We look for ways to bless each other that aren’t dictated by our consumerist culture. He loves to bring home flowers on a random Tuesday afternoon, and I love that: a) they only cost $5 at the grocery store, and b) it was his own initiative, not February 14th, that told him to get the flowers, and c) an unexpected gift is always more meaningful than an expected one.

We are so fortunate that we both are on the same page with giving. Can you imagine how miserable we’d be if I insisted on expensive presents on every holiday and birthday, but he insisted on frugality? We all give and receive love in our own way. If two people are too different in their love languages, that can cause some serious rifts. But for us, traditional “gifts” don’t fulfill our needs or desires. We’re quality-time people above all other expressions of affection.

Our thing for special occasions is pretty much always going out to eat. We do this so rarely (frequency is a relative thing, so we’re talking maybe once every two or three months) that it is a treat every time, no matter what. We go out to dinner over Christmas break and for our anniversary. Sometimes we’ll do a breakfast date at our favorite local diner, where we always try to get seated in Eileen’s section so we can chat with her about her daughters’ college adventures and she can see how much the boys have grown. We use our rewards points there so we get two meals for the price of one. We love spending time together and enjoying good food.

This Christmas, we’ve got plenty of joyful moments to look forward to, as parents of two small boys. It’ll be great to see kid #1 light up with excitement about seeing Santa, decorating the tree, opening presents, and all that jazz. It’ll be frustrating but cute when kid #2 promptly pulls down every ornament, pulls on Santa’s beard (if he treats him at all like his dad, that is), and has more fun playing with gift boxes than any actual presents.

Keeping it simple is a big goal in all of our holiday prep. We don’t need to bake seventeen different types of cookies (although I don’t mind eating them). We’ll get free pictures with Santa, see a free movie at the local theatre, and ride the free holiday lights train. The kids don’t need hundreds of dollars worth of toys to unwrap. They’ll each get a few small gifts from us–little toys or books, new pajamas for each (because we always seem to be running out of clean ones), and the older one is getting an Octonauts play set. All told, we’ll likely only spend about $70 total for Christmas for the boys together. Not bad, I think! We could go even more frugal, but it doesn’t seem necessary. It IS still Christmas:)

We still try to keep giving small gifts to each niece and nephew, as well as something for our parents. We’d be cool with it if all our family gave up gift-buying for everyone except the kids. However, we know that for many, the giving of gifts is a true expression of care and love. It’s their love language. So we don’t need to judge anyone else’s giving or stand in their way. For some, it truly would rob them of much of the joy of Christmas if we said, “No gifts EVER!” Being a gracious receiver of gifts is just as important as being a generous giver.

What is your default when it comes to giving meaningful gifts to loved ones? Do you give gifts as a way to say, “Hey, man, I love you this many dollars’ worth”? Michael Scott would say that presents are the best way to show you care. I hope that’s not how most of us feel.

Can one be frugal and not be a miserly old Scrooge? Do you feel you’ve struck a healthy balance of financial wisdom and outrageous generosity?

First movie in the theatre… Polar Express! (Free admission = paramount with two wiggly kids!)

Au revoir, student loans!

Today, I owe nothing on my student loans–hallelujah! Thirteen and a half years since college graduation, four years since completing my masters, and 35 grand gone.

It was a bit of a thrill as I logged onto my loan account this morning to see…paid in full. Balance zero. Oh, how beautiful!

Happy Thanksgiving to us! Not only are we thankful these loans are no longer over our heads, we also thank God that we’ve “awakened” in terms of our finances before it’s too late to fix things.

We’ve made plenty of errors in financial judgment, individually and together. Do we wish we had discovered and heeded the advice of Dave Ramsey, Mr. Money Mustache, and Eat the Financial Elephant years ago? Absolutely! But here we are, ages 35 and 40, and we still have time to make huge strides. Look at all we’ve been able to do in just a few short months (we first read MMM in July). Once we get his student loans taken care of (which we expect to do by summer 2016), we’ll free up soooo much cash each month. All of that surplus will go directly into savings or investments (yeah)!

We’re anticipating that next year (academic year, since we’re in education), we’ll be able to bank half our income. Yeah, that’s right. HALF. None of this wimpy 10-20% that’s advised by so many so-called financial “experts”. We’re changing the default and pressing the reset button. That’s how we’re going to make up for so many of the mistakes of the past and start finally catching up to where we ought to be.

So today, I want to pause and express how grateful I am. I know I’m so fortunate to have a decent job and income, a husband who shares the same values and goals, two amazing little boys, and a realistic hope of gaining financial independence much sooner than I ever dreamed possible.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Merry Christmas! Kill the buffet mentality!

“All you can eat!” “All you can carry!” “All you can get!” Such are our typical goals in consumption, right?

Everywhere we go, we’re greeted by the alluring call of MORE… MORE… MORE!

On the one hand, I realize the major focus of our blog is our financial overhaul, so obviously we want the most bang for our buck. I’ve gotten used to Aldi runs, where we get probably at least 50% more in groceries for what we’d spend at other markets. I love the surprise of how low the bill is every time! We try to maximize gas mileage. We try to eat well for less, filling out meals with bigger portions of beans and rice and vegetables and less meat.

However, the flip side of this more-more-more mentality is so dangerous! Do we really need more clothes? More kitchen gadgets? More home decorations or tech devices or dinners out or entertainment?

We lose our ability to enjoy the present when we’re constantly wanting more, looking ahead to the Next Big Thing. It reminds me of our two-year-old watching Octonauts. Whenever an episode gets to the final song, he starts asking, “Is there one more Octo-donks coming?” He misses out on the end of his show because he’s worried about whether we’ll turn it off.

We’re working on this default: the ever-present Desire to Get More. In order to get closer to an early semi-retirement and financial security, we need more savings and investments, but less spending and less stuff. The stupid debts for school and other things are going to be GONE by a year from now. (Yay!) We hope a lot of other things weighing us down will be gone, too. Seems like every couple of months, we (meaning Nate, mostly) go through all the crap in our basement and closets and weed out carloads of it. I swear, I have no clue where it all comes from. I think it’s a storage magic that makes you like stuff less every time you look at it. So when we cleared out boxes of books, clothes, and miscellaneous crap last summer, we thought we only kept essentials. Now, in December, when we see what’s left, we find we see even more junk where we used to see value.

All the Mountains of Useless Crap help provide extra motivation for avoiding unnecessary shopping. If I’ve finally gotten things back to a manageable amount, why would I want to go out and buy MORE Useless Crap? So I can use it for a little while only to get rid of it a few months or a year later? No thank you!

Christmas is now over, and our two little boys have been enjoying a great time in our household. But it isn’t due to piles and piles of gifts that took hours to open. We gave them a few presents, sure. It was a blast to watch them rip open packages and so encouraging when they loved their gifts. But we also ate special meals together, like Cornish hens on Christmas Eve and snowman pancakes Christmas morning. We decorated our tree together when Grandma and Grandpa visited a week ago. We delivered homemade shortbread and toffee to our neighbors. We watched tons of Christmas shows on Netflix (and while the kiddos napped, we caught a few episodes of Z Nation and Clone Wars).

We want to learn contentment ourselves, while passing that ability on to our boys. If they grow up with a few special toys they really love instead of hundreds of items they’ll never play with, they’ll appreciate those gifts all the more. Quite a few of their gifts came as hand-me-downs from the older cousins, too. They’re little–they don’t care if toys are new or not!

Little dude playing happily with a toy we received used from a sister-in-law and wrapped up for Christmas morning!

Here, our own Buddy the Elf enjoys exploring cabinets and doesn’t care about expensive toys!

We won’t be hitting the post-Christmas sales today. Nothing out there that we need. We may be tempted, but we’re aiming to be thankful for all we have.

Merry Christmas, everyone!