Welcome to our new blog, The Downshift!

For the past few years, we have been documenting our adventures in and around our home province of Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast on our other blog, thelocaltraveler.ca. During this time, while learning more about our neighbours and our corner of the world, we have been learning more about ourselves, what is important to us, and how we want to live our lives.

Since getting together six years ago, we have given away our television, begun weekly DIY nights, experimented with urban homesteading, challenged ourselves to drive less (100 days car-free in 2013), and have learned more about food security. We have experimented with a range of budgeting strategies, all of which involve consuming less stuff. We buy food with reducing packaging in mind. We got a dog.

We have been doing these things for a variety of reasons: financial, social, environmental, to achieve a better work-life balance. It has resulted in us enjoying an increasingly simple and satisfying lifestyle.

We’ve been influenced by a lot of people we’ve encountered and things we’ve read about along the way, notably the Transition Movement, the Antigonish Movement, and, more recently, traditional Acadien living. And we’ve learned that we are by no means alone. There are many, many people who are taking steps to downshift their lives.

One of the aspects of downshifting that appeals most to us is that it is not about drastically overhauling your life in an attempt to suddenly live a “perfect” life. The underlying philosophy is to identify changes you want to make, and do something a little bit better than you already are to help you achieve your goals.

The purpose of this blog is to document our efforts, including successes, challenges and failures. We hope it will help us connect with others who can share their downshifting tips with us. Hopefully, you’ll find something useful here.

We started out with a goal to simplify and reduce our food budget by eating on just $4/day for six weeks. Read about our challenges and successes here: http://halifaxbloggers.ca/thelocaltraveler/2014/09/the-downshift-the-what-and-why-of-our-4day-food-experiment/

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