Commitment

Life is horribly complicated isn’t it?

And lately I have noticed that if I can complicate it even more then hell’s bells that’s what I’m going to do.

Why stick to one supermarket, when I could visit four in one afternoon? Why get my hair cut, blown and colored by the same hairdresser, when I can call upon the services of three different stylists? How about notebooks? What kind of crazy lady keeps all her notes in one place, when she could drive herself demented dividing her thoughts in to a series of pretty little books? Use one skincare range? Hair-care product line? Ecologically sound cleaning product? No Siree. A person can waste hours hopping around the mall and the internet in search of fifty different products instead.

I am mad. My partner told me the other day that in the two years we have been together I haven’t cooked him the same meal twice. Today I went to three different supermarkets because I wanted a certain soup from one, a completely delicious olive loaf from another and cranberry lemonade from the third. And during the weekend gone by, I discovered that I am the proud owner of twenty-three lever arch files, all in different patterns, and all eschewed in favor of the set of shiny white ones I have finally settled on. This is proof of my utter madness mais non?

Seeking solutions…

I spend my life looking for solutions. Often costly solutions. Solutions that take an age to source and then do not work because I am so busy looking for a better alternative I actually fail to commit to anything at all, and thus never quite allow the things I spend money on to fulfill their potential in my life to make things calmer. Smoother. To make life work like clockwork and allow me to shift my mind to more needful matters…

Streamlining…

Sometimes I am in search of better. Often I am looking for variety. Occasionally (whisper it) I just want to spend money. Yep there is a range of mad reasons I flitter, and fritter (and end up in a jitter).

Even knowing as I do, that the most effective of women streamline their lives so that they take thinking about as many necessities of life completely out of the equation, still I keep on complicating things so I can keep on telling myself that life will be better when I find the perfect moisturizer, the diary that helps me keep track of my entire life, and the supermarket that stocks absolutely everything I like at a price that’s right.

Enough already, right?

It is time to change the habit of a lifetime and start committing to all manner of things.

To a place to shop. To an under eye cream. To one notebook in which to keep my entire life. To a hairdresser. To a bag I use daily, instead of confusing myself by swapping bags constantly. To an organic delivery box. To a library (last week I hopped around three in one afternoon!) To a monthly meal plan so I don’t spend my life dreaming up new concoctions. To a lipstick that suits me.

To a range of well-being products that don’t work against each other.

To a diary.

To a man. (Tick!).

To a box-set (recommendations please!)

To a doctor (I am a revolving patient: constantly asking for a different GP in the hope of discovering one who will banish my thyroid problems!)

To a pen (I am yet to find the perfect tip. The perfect blackest of black ink).

To a social network.

You name it I need to commit to it so that the routines and rituals I live by aren’t constant compromised by change. That the products and the services and even the people that provide them are secondary to the commitment I make to those routines and rituals, so that from my efforts to fashion days from a series of lovely habits, I can go on living a life less ordinary without imagining I need this, that or the other to improve them…

Commitment it is then. Commitment not complication.

Is the time right for you to commit to your own life too?

Originally published at www.brocantehome.net.

Alison May is the woman behind The School of Life and blogs about life, love and housekeeping at Brocante Home.