Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers

is akin to how you feel listening to an amazing live jazz show or symphony orchestra, a sense of being “lost in the music.” This engagement can happen anytime, whether you are painting, gardening, or cooking. When you are in that state, if someone were to suddenly interrupt and ask what you were feeling, the answer would probably be: nothing. Absorbed in the moment, you’ve transcended the narrow ego and become, in a real sense, one with the task at hand.
    The third factor, a sense of meaning and purpose, happens when that activity you’re so wrapped up in also contributes to a larger cause. In other words, complete engagement in shopping or NASCAR may give a temporary buzz, but it leaves an existential hangover.
    Jackie, I noticed, cultivated the second two factors in her life. She was completely engaged in her permaculture, activism, and doctoring, and all of these contributed to a higher purpose. The first factor — positive emotion — then flowed naturally, as when she told me she wakes up with “tears of joy” in the 12 × 12. As love is seemingly without limits, so too are these more intangible factors. None of the factors of genuine well-being are closely linked to material possessions. All material possessions are subject to habituation, a waning interest with repeated uses. Think of that first bite of ice cream: bliss. The second, also delicious, but perhaps 80 percent of the first. The third, yumyum; the tenth, ho-hum. So the cliché that “money doesn’t buy happiness” is grounded in this phenomenon, habituation.
    Jackie was pursuing a kind of positive psychology, not a preachy austerity; still, did her neighbors feel judged by the existence of such simplicity right next door? The Thompsons, after all, had an ordinary-sized house, three bedrooms in all, plus a nice-sized living room, a TV, and all the other electrical appliances.
    Even so, looking at things through Long Island suburban eyes one day, I wondered how Mike and Michele plus six kids — eight people — could live comfortably with just three bedrooms. Until one day, while chatting with Michele Thompson on her porch, she said rather curiously: “I don’t know why we built such a big house.”
    I didn’t say anything, looking over at a colorful Muscovy taking noisy flight from the pond. I looked at the house again. Too big ? Quite the contrary, it was a prefab house, not that big at all. “We all sleep together in one room anyway,” Michele continued. “So that’s two bedrooms too many.”
    Inadvertently I frowned slightly. It just seemed weird that eight of them would sleep in a single room. Seeing my reaction Michele explained, “We sleep with the baby and littlest one in our king-sized bed, and the others either squeeze into the bed with us, or curl up together in their sleeping bags on the carpet below! Now that Zach’s fourteen he sometimes sleeps in one of the other rooms, and Kyle has been known to join him. But there’s always at least one of the three bedrooms empty.”
    What was a little odd, perhaps, from one perspective was perfectly ordinary from another. Most of the world’s families sleep together in a single room. From the Gambian kunda to Tibetan mongour , necessity and tradition has Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and the Baby Bears all together in the same den. In Turkey, a census showed the most common place married couples had sex was the kitchen — one of the few spaces they could sequester away for some privacy. Going back just slightly in human evolutionary time, we find Homo sapiens sleeping together in communal tents or caves, not just with eightmembers of the nuclear family, but in clans of thirty or forty. So the Thompsons, by homesteading, were simplifying their material lives and increasing their sense of warmth and togetherness in a way that is quite natural in 99 percent of human history and even in most of the world today.
    DID I REALLY NEED THE CAR? Two weeks had passed without using it, and I began to