Simplicity and minimalism.
This series is about how to live a simple life, how to reduce complexity and just keep things simple.
And this is one of my favourite topics.
It seems like it takes so much complexity in order to live simply.
I mean, just to remove all the clutter, remove the chaos, and really bring things down to the most important basics, it makes life better in so many ways.
Just less distractions, less things pulling our attention in all directions, so that we can focus on only the very few things that are best, and we can put all our energy into those most important things.
Clearing away the things that get in the way that distract us makes it possible to put all our energy into the best things.
And that overall makes things better.
Of course, the hard part is it’s so hard to say goodbye to all those complex distractions.
I mean, we all have some distractions that we’re happy to just clear out of the way, but there’s so many fun and interesting things, and things that we want, and things that are possible in life, and there’s just so much possibility, enough possibility for many lifetimes, it seems.
And to actually say goodbye to a lot of it, and say no to so much of it: that is a challenging thing.
So that’s where the whole complexity comes in, when there’s a goal that’s so simple, but getting there through all the distractions: that can be complex.
I mean, it starts with, I think, just imagining that it is possible for life to be simple.
Even just the thought that we don’t really need to have all this complexity: that leaves it open for us to maybe let some of the complexity go.
Even if it doesn’t happen right away, just knowing that a lot of the things that we’re concerned about a lot of the time are not actually necessary, they’re optional.
And just that change in thought from seeing something as being required to being optional: that seems like it can go a long way to starting that process of letting it go.
So how do we get this decluttering going? We have clearing our mind, all the many thoughts.
There’s many different fields of decluttering.
Like our mind, the many thoughts going through our head: we can simplify that.
One way is by just removing some words.
Just a little bit less words.
We get so many words going into our head, which I’m adding to myself with videos like this.
And we have- there’s just all this so much input of words, and people talking all the time, and we’re talking inside our minds, and sometimes it can be great to just turn off the words.
Maybe just allow some music to happen.
Maybe even just sounds, just background sounds that are not words at all, and just allow some empty space in the mind.
And sometimes I find it hard, because being empty, it feels like you’re doing nothing, kind of wasting time.
And that’s a challenge, with this feeling that doing nothing is wasting time, that it’s sort of underachieving.
But it’s that kind of thought that leads us to try to cram everything in and do as much as possible and think as much as possible and be as much as possible, and we’re sort of like cramming in the clutter in order to avoid underachieving.
We don’t want to miss out on any of those opportunities.
So we can also clear our timeline.
Clear the schedule.
Do as few things as possible.
Allow empty time.
We can clear our to-do list, by just deciding very sternly if we need it, remove things from our to-do list, or we can go into the backlog, go into that backlog and start clearing out things, just keep cutting down the to-do list.
This is my ongoing work that just seems to keep going, and it’s so hard to really get into that backlog and really clear it out, because so many new things come up.
But the more we can simplify our life, the more we can go into that backlog and just clear up everything we need to do.
And we can also apply it, of course, to our environment.
Often this word “minimalism” is focused on our physical environment.
We can simplify our physical environment, which then changes our mindset.
And the same thing applies to our digital environment, the way our computer, phone devices are set up, keeping everything as simple as possible.
So all of these things together can help to just remove all the clutter and distraction in life and bring our focus down to the most important things.
#simplicity #minimalism #simplelife