In the last video, I talked about how having all our regular routines, our regular activities, regular freedoms, being suddenly taken away from us can help us to appreciate how much those things mean to us.
After all, we don’t really appreciate anything until it is taken away.
At least there’s a fuller appreciation that comes from the lack of something.
It’s just so easy to become accustomed to what we have.
But there’s another advantage to it as well, another possible opportunity, and that’s in the whole idea of having a blank slate, and taking things back to a state of simplicity.
Because we have had so many activities taken away, and all the things that maybe would normally fill a lot of our time have now been changed Now, for some of us, that would be the whole work itself, the main meat of the week, or the main centre of our time, how we’re spending time.
But even for those of us that have not had a big change in work life, still so many social activities have been completely suspended.
So now we’re in a state where we can consider: what do we actually want to bring back online once we can? Of course, we could simply, as soon as we get the green light, suddenly resume all the activities that we have been forced to suspend.
But on the other hand, we could also use this as an opportunity to one by one bring these activities back, see which ones we need, decide maybe that we don’t need to restore all those activities.
Maybe our time was too full.
Maybe we were too busy, too distracted, and torn in too many directions, and now we have this opportunity to simplify how we spend our time.
So now we can think about, well, what’s the activity that I miss the most? Something that I really feel like the lack of it is really a hole in my life? And that would be something that would be worth bringing back as soon as possible.
But maybe there’s other activities that don’t really call us as much, that we don’t really miss now that we can’t do them.
And maybe in some cases even we can have a certain kind of relief that oh, there was that activity that I kind of felt like, you know, I should do, maybe some kind of sense of social obligation, or out of habit, and now I really don’t mind not having to do that activity.
So now’s a chance to hit the reset on our activities, decide what is going to make the cut, what is it that we actually want to bring back, versus some things, we can just have this as a convenient chance to let them drop and not pick them up again.
Because it seems like, with so much selection of things to do overwhelming, we have simply too much on our plate, too much going on for the time we have, in so many cases.
And if we can simply drop some of these things, we can simplify and bring things down to basics.
Now, the only thing that doesn’t really make this a perfect scenario, that takes away from the perfect simplicity of the scenario, the idea that we have this perfect chance to simplify our lives, is that we have these electronic devices inside our homes that themselves lead to- they just generate limitless ways to spend our time.
So it’s easy to not feel this sense of simplification, this sense of having a blank slate of our time, because it’s so easy to fill our time with anything that’s coming at us digitally.
So unfortunately, it seems like this whole idea only works with the in-person activities, the activities that involve going out, and the simplification of our lives on these devices is a whole different story.
But that’s something that hasn’t been suspended at all.
In fact it’s only been increased.
And so it seems like the only way to get that under control is simply to occasionally, maybe once in a while, turn these things off.
#blankslate #restart #simplify