Last week, inspired by my old sandals’ new soles, I looked at the importance of the second “R” in “reduce, reuse, recycle.” To reuse things, we need to know how to fix them and how to share them. But obstacles lie in our way.

“One reason it’s difficult to live simply is that we have no infrastructure for sharing,” said a participant in one of the simple living sessions I’ve been teaching at Holden Village.

Yes—and no. Craig’s list and www.freecycle.com are good signs that the online infrastructure for sharing is growing. Car-sharing is gaining ground in urban communities. But market forces relentlessly tout the merits of personal ownership, persuading us to buy our very own lawn mower, bicycle, car, snow blower, power washer, or home—and to upgrade instead of repairing items on hand. Sharing hurts the bottom line!

Fortunately, churches do offer an infrastructure for sharing. What church isn’t already collecting and redistributing canned goods, quilts, and school and health kits? We take seriously the dictum to give away our second coat to our neighbor. Is it possible to extend our infrastructure of sharing to ourselves, and find ways to swap or share goods and talents that build community, lower stress, and consume less?

This kind of sharing could change the way we share with unknown others. Do we buy the generic brand for the food pantry, give away our oldest clothes, or buy the cheapest stuff for service projects? At a simple living session I led in Pennsylvania, a woman wondered whether the child who received her church’s school kit might actually have made the inexpensive items that were inside it. “It’s like we’ve decided we’re gonna help other people, and we’re going to go to WalMart to do it,” she said.

Instead of “sharing” by sending cheap things elsewhere, let’s take a page from early Christian communities and learn how to pool more of our resources. Let’s follow the example of the congregation that cans vegetables together and shares the results, or the congregation that holds regular “freecycles” in which people swap needed items, or the congregational repair clinic that fixes beloved old shoes and sweaters and restores vacuums to working order.

This kind of sharing is mutual, not one sided. Accepting a mattress, a can of tomatoes, or new soles from our own community teaches us to be receivers of gifts, not just givers or consumers of stuff. The infrastructure of mutual sharing is liberating, and carves an alternative path in a cluttered, overcommitted, overspent culture.

We can call it “the path less purchased.”

Anne Basye

My sandals have new soles—and it took a village!

I can’t thank my local shoe repair man. How he pays the rent is a mystery, when each time I offer him a pair of shoes to fix, he sneers at me and thrusts them back, yelling (he doesn’t hear well) “No! No good!”

My well-loved and well-worn Mexican sandals are the most recent shoes he spurned. They were too cheap; I could buy three new pairs for the price he’d charge me; I should throw them away; etc, etc. But then I came to Holden Village.

If you’ve ever visited this Lutheran retreat center tucked in the mountains of central Washington, you know that it’s a place that values creative re-use. Clothing, furniture, and books shift endlessly from use to use, owner to owner. From the boxes of extra, free men’s, women’s and children’s clothing, a friend fished a pair of flip flops. He detached the soles, used glue and clamps to attach them to my sandals, and now I am walking with the confidence of a woman who knows her next step won’t be her shoes’ last.

Remember the mantra, “reduce, reuse, recycle?” Reducing—making and buying less—is straightforward if unpopular. Recycling is getting easier as more businesses and communities go “green.” But when a man trained to repair shoes won’t do so, you know that fixing, repurposing, or sharing things is a lost art.

Let’s try to change this. Check your closet for an item that needs hemming, or a new button, or a new sole, or a new plug. Fix it yourself, or find someone who can help you. For creative inspiration, get a copy of the hip do-it-yourself magazine, Ready Made.

Stand up for reuse, that forgotten second “R!”

Recently I jumped on one of our biggest national bandwagons: I rented a self-storage unit.

As a person who tries to live simply, I’m a little ashamed to be among the one in ten American households with a storage unit. But my place had to emptied before I went to the closing and signed it over to the new owners, and I had no new home address. Into the storage unit everything went, along with my $120 monthly rent. No wonder the U.S. self-storage business takes in more than $22 billion a year. Even the recession can’t slow demand for storage!

Compare that to South Africa, where, a leader of the Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa told me, the fastest-growing industry is the funeral industry, driven by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. During the same decade that the U.S. self-storage business was exploding, the annual number of registered deaths in South Africa rose by 91 percent.

One country stores stuff; the other stores people. What would the world feel like if the money spent on our extra stuff were spent on keeping others out of coffins?