Epicurean, simple living in small town rural Maine.
The direction, how you chose to live your life happens slowly. My Dad told me there are two basic groups of people. And like the soft serve ice cream, a blend flavor of the two chocolate and vanilla. There are vocation and vacation folks. The two pursue and craft their lifestyle around what they love but the source of joy is not quite the same.
For many, a job is a means to an end and fought tooth and nail to keep the wolf from your door.
Making ends meet is easier if your financial obligations are few. For some, the spark of creating a local business that provides a community service or produces goods is the end all. Your purpose in life is usually what you are good at and derive enjoyment from for work. If you find pleasure in your career employment labor, they say you never have to work a day in your life. Because work does not feel like toil or the love, sweat and tears is the satisfaction. You take home more than a pay check. You also enjoy the people you work with and serve in the public.
Your grit, stick with it determination and reinventing what you do to make it new and different pays dividends.
Everything we do in our Maine real estate primary job is all about the user experience. Not wasting anyone’s time. Making the delivery more efficient, far reaching for providing information on properties for sale with a taste of the local area community flavor. When you can mix business with pleasure on say a trip accomplishing more than one goal, that is win win too. Coronovirus has made all of us “cool our jets”. The Governor, the state of Maine REALTORS are directing us to stop face to face public showings for everyone’s safety sake. Appraisers in Maine have the go ahead to do only exterior inspections and don’t go in. But study images, MLS descriptions, videos if the real estate broker provides them for the public online consumption.
When you are lucky enough to live a simple small town rural Maine lifestyle. If you volunteer and provide something for work that benefits your community, that is highly satisfying. When you see many others working just as hard all together for a common goal, that is a beautiful thing. People choosing simple small town living in rural Maine are very very fortunate. The case just gets stronger when something like the coronovirus pandemic hits. Smaller but tighter Spartan like trained communities are tighter, fiercely connected for survival, for family, for purpose.
So who was Epicurus? What does epicurean mean?
For starters let’s take the latter term. Epicurean means the pursuit of pleasure, especially in the area of the food, comfort, whatever luxuries you add to your daily existence. The simpler your life, the more you achieve pleasure and comfort. It is like you leave room for the small things that more than enough to satisfy. My mom preached moderation which sounds like a wet blanket approach to anyone that races through life full throttle and with wreck-less abandoned. But the easy does it, first things first structure and routine is boring and controlling for some. It makes life so much easier for others. Epicurus, who was he? Was his family from Vanceboro Maine? NOooooo, take the island of Greece. That’s a few time zones away from the Pine Tree state. A philosopher who knew deeply ingrained thought took a lot of energy and patience to change for the better in shuffling your life outlook priorities.
Don’t tell me what to do. You are not the boss of me. Sounds like a child doesn’t it?
But we are all children that grow up shaped and weathered by life experiences and from those that love and mentored us. We know what we think we don’t want but the pursuit of what we do need. That is a little fuzzy and becomes even harder to see if your life is run externally. If you watch what others do, what they have and want that you set out to mirror.
You become a copy and are no longer a raw real original one of a kind.
In simple small town rural living in Maine, you can be an original. There are not others competing for the job for public service and you feel needed volunteering. When you take on a community project, often you are involved in it with other locals you really get to know deeper. It is a task for life. It is not once and done. Not something you do for the press or fame or attention. You do it because of the inner self satisfaction whether it is appreciated or not because others work behind the scenes laboring just as hard or harder than you do. There is nothing stronger than the heart of a small rural Maine town volunteer.
The course of your life is like a string.
No one of us knows for certain how long or short that piece of string is. How many knots, how crooked or straight that string becomes is not known by us. But where we are headed? You, me, our small rural Maine community with it’s simple lifestyle. The struggles and triumphs, the setbacks and victories.
Everything we go through helps us distill it all down to focus on what is most important.
Like swimming ashore if you have been on an island. It really is move, lead or get out of the way if you want to help yourself, your family, your small rural community. If you find yourself in hell, keep moving. Head down, see the target, one step at a time to achieve the goal target. We are all retrenching, staying at home and fortifying our “islands” until the coast is clear.
How much do you need to be happy? Are the simple pleasures of lots of clean fresh water, a hot shower, a cup of coffee, a sunrise or sunset observed with plenty of fresh air surrounding you enough? Shelter that keeps you in out of the elements dry and protected. Is having that for you and your loved ones satisfying? Or is there a strong desire to be hell bent on the mad dash for “add ons”.
The expensive, man made itches to scratch caused by highly effective marketing or insecurity of following “the Jones”?
Your peace of mind is built on a foundation based on the premise “what little your have is more than enough” in small rural Maine living. Hunger improves the taste too and if things comes hard, they are highly cherished and more precious respected. Cared for, protected and not thrown away. Patience is a virtue and takes a lifetime to develop. Forgiveness is a skill many never achieve fully. The coronovirus makes you reach out and make amends or should. There is good that comes out of shared struggles and being between a rock and a hard place together.
There is much to do and accomplish and no easy short cuts to skip steps and it is a marathon not a sprint 100 yard quick and done dash. Much soul searching and correction or addition in our life calculations happens when a coronovirus hits, or the economy tanks. The present becomes easier with lessons learning looking back at the past. Older generations will tell you their biggest fears and how they worked around them to become stronger and to cope. Being up against it and living like you are in or awfully close to a recession is nothing new if you have logged some years living in Maine. Epicurean simple living in small town rural Maine.
This week, while shopping for a two week stint and the stay away so others can I saw a respected friend.
Gone are the days to linger in a grocery store aisle conversing with those your meet and greet. But the next day, I reached back to the lady I only gave a smile and a nod in the hurry to shop and leave. I called and talked to a high school honors English teacher, Mrs Elizabeth Stone Wednesday afternoon. A widow, loosing her husband, my Algebra two instructor at sixty one, Mrs Stone says she was in North Carolina during the Cuban missile crisis. Another older community member in her late 80’s earlier this week told me that was her scariest moment too looking back over her life.
Nuclear attack, high flying U-2 aircraft black and white glossy photos of Russian missiles on decks of boats headed to the Cuban island nation too close for comfort.
Both ladies felt the same looking back over their shoulders at earlier life. Being at the brink of it as it played out way too handy to the USA. Made the deepest impression on these two women. Losing President Kennedy much the same unsettling news to swallow all around the same period of American history.
I remember the late November day getting off the yellow bus and walking up the long tall maple lined driveway to my Northern Maine farm home.
Cold, raw dark day for weather. After taking off the boots, hanging up the coat winter bought with potato picking money. Seeing mom ironing and watching with serious concern Walter Cronkite who with black rimmed glasses told us what was going on in Dallas Texas. We shall see if the COVID 19 virus changes what was the scariest point in our lives. Or what was learned from earlier challenges will make this look pale in comparison.
Fear, worry and dealing emotionally with the unknown. Hopefully you and I get better at it. The longer you are live life, the more perspective and the less shook up you get right? How you make the most of your time, deciding what you can do and what you have no control over. It makes the course of action pretty simple. Your thoughts and how you sleep nights or not cranks up or lowers your anxiety level and for those around you. Mom called it “stinking thinking” and correcting your thoughts is like control, alternate, delete or clearing your cache. Taking out the trash.
How are you handling the newscasts and updates on coronorvirus from where you are currently? Epicurean simple living in small town rural Maine
Epicurean lifestyle, simple living in rural small town Maine.
How to accomplish a healthy life. Appreciation of what you have. Basic needs met and good enough. Not elaborate long lists of wants and desires the end all in your life. In small town rural Maine, I am grateful for clean water to drink, to bathe, to wash my hands to fight the coronovirus spread or infection. Good home grown farm to table produce and organic un-sprayed vegetables. A a local dairy where they don’t use BST growth hormones. Happy cows on small Mom and Pop sized local farms not factory ones. Ditto with collecting the eggs from the Mother hens who are happy, know how to walk and put themselves to bed nightly. Protecting them from the fox who has a family to feed and loves chicken dinners if your dog is lax or the perimeter protection is low.
My first grandchild lives locally in a small town in rural Maine.
Another is on the way coming into the World this month in difficult times in the Bay State. We will all survive. With simple living in small town rural Maine already in place, next winter heating with wood is no big adjustment for many. Most already supplement or heat totally with firewood or pellets. Living lean and frugal and wasting nothing. That is the way we were raised in small rural Maine towns where no one is flush with money and careful use of it is taught early on. Is it like that where you live now? Maine, is the way life should be in so many ways. We already had our heads screwed on straight so to speak.
I love my small northern Maine town.
We all know and work together to pull through any life ordeal and come out the other side stronger for it. Stay safe, shelter in place and work from home remotely. Nothing new for the daily adjustment in Maine. Modest, frugal, austere, simple, plain is the way we live our lives. No big adjustment because we don’t live to excess. Gourmet, luxury, deluxe, rich or lavish does not describe the typical Mainer’s approach to daily living. We over dose on the outdoor recreation, the four season beauty of pure and natural though.
Like someone put an oxygen mask of pure 100% Maine air to fill our lungs.
Epicurean simple living in small town rural Maine, the blog post title that kept your reading this far. We are outdoors year round. Exercise without bumping into others. Not hard with 11 people per square mile in Northern Maine. Once you live here, as you learn to adjust to living on less which is way more than enough, all of us gain the shared appreciation. You will realize how very lucky we are to have the privilege of living in Maine, Vacationland. That money is not the carrot. Epicurean simple living in small town rural Maine
My dad and mom would tell the four boys in our family that growing up they were all poor and did not know it.
Both living and raised on small Maine farms and taught self sufficiency. To roll up their sleeves and pitch in to provide all the needed basics without the use of money. The basics that matter most of good food, clean water, solid shelter, strong family love and a sense of safety makes a person say “I’m good”. Take only what you need, pass along to others the rest. Helping out and making sure no one is left behind in small rural Maine towns. Nothing new with the coronovirus on our personal radar for all of us in small rural towns in Maine. But online you read about folks scrambling to get to grips with the hitting an iceberg like pandemic terror. We have had lots of time to prepared mentally and physically. Because it all started on the other side of the globe before arriving in the United States. Cultural change takes time though and getting up to speed is not a choice but a matter of life and death for yourself and others.
We’ve had pandemics before in Maine. My Uncle Bud had TB and had to be quarantined down in Lewiston if I remember correctly. My secretary says she had a family member with TB who got whisked away and spent a considerable amount of time down in Bangor’s Eastern Maine hospital. My secretary was in high school during that family ordeal. There are lots of local town community members who have family members or they themselves touched by the polio virus. They survived. I know a few walking with limps because of it and they are hanging in with this newest challenge.
Epicurean, simple living in small town Maine.
Everyone is reassessing their life priorities. And making lots of money is losing it’s appeal. Pulled down under the waterline holding your breath with too much debt is for the birds. What’s important to you? Maybe what matters most is suddenly a simple luxury. Maybe we live in genteel poverty in Maine and are a bit hickish. But at least we realize what we don’t need, what we are are not missing That truly might be “happiness is bliss” state of mind. All I know if small rural Maine town members are survivors, creative, hard working and family first orientated. We won’t just get through the coronovirus but it does leave us with lessons learned. Ones passed on from older community members who did time and are a wealth of experiences to glean. Stay safe loyal Me In Maine blog post readers.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew F. Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North ST Houlton ME 04730 USA