Welcome to our Simplicity Diary with me, Kim John Payne. You know, this week I was reminded by my daughter, who's now much, much older, and who was remembering back to a birthday party that we had when she was quite little, and we had a good laugh about it, but she had just come back from working at a recycling, and just really, you know, trying to take care of the planet, and she's an older teenager, and she was filled with, you know, how much we're using and consuming in the world needlessly, and she remembered back to when she was very little, and her first memory of her birthday party, one of her, when she, in her early years, and we had a laugh because her comment when she saw the cake on the table, and the food, and the, and all the lovely things that were spread out, and the presents, and it was just this beautiful birthday table with flowers and candles, and it was really astonishing, and to her, and she, her comment with her big, big eyes as she looked at it all, and she said, Daddy, Daddy, am I a princess, and are you a king, and Mummy a queen? She figured that only, only a princess and a royal family could have this much stuff, and, you know, she was, she was remembering back to that because her comment just recently was, you know, we all seem to now want to live like kings and queens. We eat like kings and queens.
We have food from all over the world. We have products that, that only two or three hundred years ago, things in our lives that only a tiny fraction of the world's population would ever dream of having, and she was conflicted about it. We talked about it because it's great that we all have now access to this, and it's not just the exclusive realm of the aristocracy, but at the same time she was musing that the planet just can't sustain it, and why do we expect to live this way, and, and how is it possible that we create so much waste, and she was really bothered by the amount of, of stuff that she would find in containers that were just a one-time-use thing, and, you know, more and more we're getting on to this, and it's, and it's, you know, a small but growing number of people are really starting to think about reusing and what we can do and in that way, but this sense of entitlement that we are all now entitled to live this, this, this kind of lifestyle that is unsustainable for the planet, and one of the things, you know, you wait a long time to hear your kids say this, but one of the things that I was so pleased that her and her sister talked about is, and they don't often talk about it, you know, it's just a part of our life, but they talked about simplicity parenting, and they, they, they were more conscious of it, and they, they talked about how in this simplicity parenting community and movement all around the world, you know, maybe that's a way that this, all this living like, like royalty that everyone expects and to be served at every moment, maybe that's how we can wake people up, and boy, that was a, you know, you wait a long time as a, as a, as a parent to hear your kids talk about that, you know, and it was a very brief little comment, and on they went to the next, the next thing, but Catherine and I, my wife and I caught each other's eye and just thought, wow, okay, remember that one.
So there's our simplicity diary for this week. Hope this has been interesting to you. Okay, bye-bye.
