My Year of No Shopping. June 2023.
I fell off the No Shopping Wagon this month. I also fell into a fully-lived life. Moving forward, I’d like to get back on the wagon, and see this No Shopping experiment through to the year’s end…
… but I’d also like to continue the trajectory of a fully-lived life. Allow me to elaborate:
The first week of June is the weekend designated for an annual reunion of my college girlfriends. We live all over the world, and newsflash, are all rather busy. “Rather busy” feels like an inherent descriptor for the modern American woman, but I include it to emphasize that we aren’t of the text-thread variety of old friends. Every once in a while, someone will group text, and it’s always a surprise. We are in different time zones, juggling family life and careers.
This one weekend together entails a lot of catching up.
This year landed us on the shores of Lake Michigan. We drove or flew to be together (except for the one currently living in Japan, sad emoji), and talked for 48 hours.
Being with old friends is a homecoming for me. We are no longer the naive girls who were randomly placed in the same dorm freshman year. We have all navigated the challenges life brings. We are all still here, more beautiful and whole and compassionate and capable with every passing year.
What has this to do with shopping? Good question.
Firstly, while the seven of us have different tastes and styles, there’s something about being with your friends that makes you want to buy all their stuff. The bags and purses, the SKINCARE PRODUCTS, the jeans, the dresses, the board games. It all looks shiny and new on their person.
(Side note surprise: the spinal surgeon gifted me an Aveda shampoo bar. Not because she reads this blog [pretty sure she doesn’t know it exists what with 4 children and spines to do surgery on]. She gifted it because during college I had ringlet curly hair and I tamed those curls with Aveda product. To this day, when she smells Aveda products, she thinks of me. [Don’t get me started on how special this makes me feel.] So I’m thinking this was a free gift in one of her purchases which she could do without? BUT: remember how desperately I wanted a shampoo bar in the winter?! DO YOU REMEMBER? The gift felt magical.)
Secondly, and this is where things get interesting, on a whim one of the group arranged a yoga session for Sunday morning. We all agreed it was a great idea, but if I’m being completely honest, I dreaded it. I morally oppose group fitness. And, I have a long history with yoga, but it’s been ages since I’ve unrolled my yoga mat.
In the summer of 2004, I took a break from grad school and got certified as a Hatha yoga instructor at Yogaville in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I know. What a great sentence. Was Maura part of a commune? Did Maura dabble in cults? Almost and always.
Anyway, I barely had a yoga practice of my own, but I’d visit my mom in Maine the summer prior. She was living there on a teacher’s grant she’d been awarded, living the writer’s life. When I visited, she brought me to her yoga class, which was filled with other middle-aged women. I didn’t really know anything about yoga, but I was young and bendy, and during Warrior 1, the instructor pointed out to the rest of the group my perfect pose….
And I rode that compliment for all it’s worth. As you can see, I remember it to this day.
So, with hardly any yoga experience, I happily forked over $2,000 of my waitressing funds, took a break from my M.F.A. work, and attended daily instructions to become a certified yogi. My plan was to teach in New York City the following year and support my acting life by being a yoga instructor.
Guess what? That was every other actress’s plan, too. I only had the energy to market myself as an actor, not an actor and a yoga instructor, so I never ended up teaching yoga in the city. But, I did get my certification, ‘learned a lot about myself,’ and went on to teach at UVA sorority houses the following year.
This chapter of my life, like many, delights me in its kookiness.
Anyway, my practice wasn’t extensive, but I maintained a-dozen-sun-salutations-a-day until my daughter’s due date. From there, I never really returned to yoga.
So while the IDEA of yoga on a screened-in porch at a Lake Michigan VRBO (that feels like it’s from the set of a Nora Ephron movie) - while the idea sounds dreamy, the reality is that I feared I would not be able to touch my toes, and that I’d most certainly queef in front of my friends.
But I pretended I was someone else and agreed to it.
Turns out it felt great. I didn’t queef (!). I took a lot of deep breaths. We all wondered why we didn’t do yoga more often.
And later that week, back at home on an impromptu walk with another old friend (this one from high school), she revealed to me that she had a new 6 am hot yoga practice.
In addition to group fitness, I also happen to morally oppose hot yoga.
I’ve tried hot yoga twice; it was too hard and too slippery. But this old friend talked about how it combined sauna-like sweating + stretching all at once, and riding on the memory of the screened-in-porch yoga and my long-time deep desire to invest in (jk, let’s call it what is is: BUY) an at-home sauna, I was sold.
Much like my yogi certification training, I didn’t give it another thought. There was already a “F*ck yes!” coursing through my veins. So before my brain could talk me out of it, I signed up for the 2-week $29 all-you-can-get pass at her yoga studio, and I went the next morning.
(Side note: when I opened the door to the yoga studio, I discovered that it wasn’t just hot, it was dark. Lit only by a few salt lamps. I don’t morally oppose group fitness in the dark. Praise be.)
I haven’t stopped going since. Everything has changed.
But back to shopping: this new practice required a few items…
Now, I’m not going to count the new sports tanks with built-in bras because frankly, what I was wearing prior to hardly constituted “sports bras.” Like, my twins deserve way better. These tanks were necessary upgrades, like my husband’s running shoes.
But I bought yoga towels. I bought five of them. I figured that the cost of five yoga towels outweighed the cost and energy expenditure of running the washer more frequently.
And, I’m buying class passes. Is this shopping? Yep. Can I put off this yoga practice til January 1, 2024, because I’ve instituted a No Shopping Year? I cannot. Am I a failure? I don’t care if I am.
Could the towels be my second mulligan? I think so. Do I also desire an upgraded yoga mat? I do. At first, I thought I could hold off, but my knees + my $15 yoga mat are proving to be enemies. Jury’s out but it’s looking like I’ll be upgrading. Does all the yoga gear count as one mulligan????
I feel like I’m just getting sneaky here.
I think of Anne Patchett, my guardian angel on this No Shopping Quest. Anne Patchett does yoga. She writes of an at-home practice. Do I have the ability to have my own at-home practice? I do. Let’s remember that I’m a highly trained yoga instructor. Do I have the capacity to guide myself? I think I’ve proven over the course of 19 years that I do not.
Halfway through the month, I went to Brooklyn for 24 hours. Another old friend - this one also from college, but we met not in the dorm but during the semesters abroad - is going through her own interesting chapter. My daughter was at Grandma Camp and I found a reasonably priced plane ticket. So I purchased. I shopped for a plane ticket. See: me falling off the wagon.
My husband says that this year is turning into The Year of Justifying Our Purchases instead of No Shopping. He’s right. We’re traveling more than we have in years (Covid really slowed that down). We’re spending money. But according to our bank account, we’re not spending more. It seems that experiences (yoga and travel for me, music shows and travel for him) are replacing stuff.
If that doesn’t align with my values, I don’t know what does. So if less stuff is making more living possible, more connecting with loved ones and reconnecting with passions, but it’s not impacting our wallets? I feel like we’re winning.
That’s what I always forget about experiments. You never really know where they lead or what they will reveal. A failure of outcome could also be a discovery of a whole new path.
But I’m hopping back on the wagon, guys. I’m curious about what will happen next. It’s all so riveting, isn’t it?!
Nonetheless, my list of Shopping Wants accumulated (if my friends’ belongings at Lake Michigan made me pine, imagine what happened upon staying at my friend’s Dwell-Magazine-worthy Brooklyn home.) As ever, it’s humbling to be me:
Elliptical (pre-yoga)
Folding Treadmill (pre-yoga)
AYR jeans
Food52 placemats
Family games: Dragonwood, Sleeping Queens, and Secshi
Onsen waffle hand towels
Target Casa Luna hand towels
Vince silk blouses
