description: Introduction to The Treasures of Simple Living Introduction  Our future was set out for us: full-time jobs, mortgage payments for the next 20 years, and retirement at 65. Our children would go to school and we would see them as much as our busy schedules allowed. But such a future held no attraction for us. So we packed up, left it all behind and drove into the unknown. Our journey took us beyond the electric lines, telephone, paved roads and television. We built our own house, grew salads year-round in a solar greenhouse, and taught our children at home, all in the midst of a forest where the nearest neighbors are wild animals, and the snow gets four feet deep.  The inconveniences were soon forgotten in the joys of living under our own roof, watching our children blossom, and discovering abilities we never knew we had. The simplicity took away economic pressures and gave us time to search for life's deeper meanings.  PART I explains why we left the city, how we solved the problem of earning a living and what we went through once we bought a piece of land in the middle of a forest.  PART II tells about the treasures we found in our simple life, and why our experiment paid us back a thousand-fold.  PART III describes common obstacles to creating a new lifestyle closer to nature, and some important skills that helped us along the way. We published The Treasures of Simple Living in 1987, and have left it here much as it first appeared. Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step updates that story, but more importantly, tries to describe and distill how living in the forest changed the way we saw the world we had grown up in, and convinced us a better way of living was possible. Jim and Tyra, the forest, Summer 2004
language: English
title: The Treasures of Simple Living and Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step
titlecomplete: The Treasures of Simple Living and Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Inner Growth Books and Videos, LLC