Merissa A. Alink - Living Slower: Simple Ideas to Eliminate Excess and Make Time for What Matters

I always wanted to live a simple life. As a carefree young girl growing up on the South Dakota prairie, I wanted nothing more than to run around barefoot in the warm summer sun or to pack a picnic and enjoy it by a creek somewhere in the Black Hills. I was born with a longing for freedom, and my heart pumped that longing through my veins. I wanted to chase that freedom and live the life of my dreams.

In my teen years, I needed to begin making some decisions about which college to attend. My heart wanted to be lying in the sunshine reading books, writing books, and somewhere down the line, raising babies to be just as wild and free as my own soul was. But my brain told me no, thats not practical. When one grows up, one must go to a good school and then get a good job and have a wonderful career. Or at least thats what my family and my culture told me, and that was the direction I was encouraged toward. After that, if it worked out, I could have some babies, but whatever I did, I needed to be successful. The opposite of success is failure, and I didnt want to be a failure. So, successful I would be.

However, at sixteen, I met the boy of my dreams. I didnt know it at the time, and neither did he. We were both working at Target. He was a cart attendant, and I worked in customer service. He claims that I never paid attention to him because of his lowly job status. The truth was, my head was stuck in the clouds and I didnt have time for boys. They would be a part of my future, but they werent included in my short-term goals. I needed to go to college and get that good career first.

I picked a good school and started on a path that I didnt necessarily want to be on but that, I was told, would be best for my future. I didnt stop to think about why society knew better than I did what would be best for my future. I just went along with it and decided I must not be smart enough to know what I should be doing. I would let others decide that for me.

I wanted what everyonemy family, my coworkers, my friends, societytold me I should want: to lead a successful life. But I never stopped to think about what success meant to me. Even worse, I never stopped to truly ask God if that version of success was where He wanted me to be. What did He want from me? Who did God create Merissa to be? I wish Id asked that sooner. But then, maybe if I had, I wouldnt be writing this book.

I made it through one whole year of college. I wasnt a bad student. I actually excelled in all my classes. But I had no drive. College was not my dream; it was someone elses. My dream was to write and to raise a family. I didnt need college to accomplish those goals.

Married Life

The boy I met working at Target was persistent. He finally asked for my phone number when I was eighteen, and the next few months went by in a blur. We discovered we were basically the same person but in two different bodies, and we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. So, on a windy day in September, nine months after he asked for my phone number, we were married.

At that point, I was done with school. I decided that Id skip ahead from the career plan and start the family plan instead. In the meantime, I wanted to be the best wife I could be.

When I was growing up, I was taught many skills that some would consider to be old-fashioned. I was cooking full meals by the time I was ten. I knew how to sew, weave baskets, kill a rattlesnake, keep a good garden, and preserve my harvest by canning. When my husband and I got married, I wanted to be able to do all these things for my household. I wanted us to have the very best garden and to be as self-sustaining as we could be, mainly because I loved doing those things. But this almost turned into a competition with myself. I taught myself how to make many things that one would normally buy from the storeketchup, candy bars, and anything else I could think of.

Unfortunately, things didnt go exactly as I had planned after we got married. I forgot about this little thing called money and that when you are nineteen, you dont usually Wed hit rock bottom, and there was nowhere to go but up.

All the trial and error of making things, growing things, living frugally, and everything in between turned into a blog. Because our first home was a little green house on ten acres and I had nicknamed it Little House on the Prairie, what better name to call the blog than Little House Living ? I shared how we were living frugally and simply in our little house out on that South Dakota prairie. My book and my blog featured all kinds of ideas on how to make your own everything, from shampoo to taco seasoning.

However, in those first few years of marriage, I was always in a state of anxiety or depression, and I couldnt figure out why. My body wasnt very healthy, but I was working harder at life than ever before. Things should have been wonderful, right? We were working our way toward the American Dream! I worked at a small retail store, and my husband worked as a debt collector. In those early days, my version of simpler and slower living was to try to make as much money as we could so we could have the things we wanted: a nice house and a good future. For me, that was the American Dream: to have everything we wanted or needed and to be able to do the things we wanted to do.