Something that I’ve really been enjoying doing these days is always looking for a way to simplify.
Now, it seems to me that life really is very simple.
We don’t need very much in order to live.
And so much gets spun out in the complexity of all the things that can possibly be added, and there’s so many things going on in the world that it’s easy to feel like, you know, we’re left out of, you know, all the things that are going on, and every day we’re just full of these, you know, invitations for what we can possibly add to our lives.
Being reminded of things that we’re missing, and being told about great opportunities that we haven’t seized yet, and we get bored with what we have.
So always looking for something new to provide some kind of stimulation, some kind of novelty.
There’s this constant adding of complexity.
And yet, then when it comes time to getting things done, figuring out what the best thing to do is, making decisions for our lives, it seems like so often I just feel like there’s this kind of fuzziness, this kind of cloud of concerns, this cloud of stuff that is filling my head, so that it really becomes a distraction from the things that we really need.
I mean, think about what we actually need to have a good life, and so much of what we spend so much of our time on disappears.
So I find that I’m liking this as my general plan, is to find each day- I don’t have a perfect plan for each day, I don’t know the best way to spend every day, I don’t have an exact plan of what I’m gonna be doing, you know, day by day for the next year or whatever.
I don’t have all of this worked out.
But I like going into the day thinking that my goal is to reduce complexity.
I am going to simplify my life, and that’s my goal for today.
So a lot of it is, you know, taking care of loose ends.
All those little things that are kind of nagging in the back of our mind, like oh, at some point I have to do this, have to do this, take care of that: all these things that are just sort of lurking in the background as elements of complexity.
So when I think about my life, I think oh, there’s so many things I have to do.
But if I can just attack some of those items in a way where I can cross some things off the list, find any way to reduce what is hanging over my head.
Some things can simply be removed entirely.
It’s OK, I don’t need that.
I had a note to maybe look into something that might be interesting: meh, I have enough else to do.
And I’m getting all these emails: OK, I can unsubscribe from these various things that are always dropping in on me.
Some things can be made into a more orderly, automated system, where I can say OK, this is a thing I will have to do at some point.
I can leave a note to remind myself of it at that point, and then until then I don’t have to care about it.
Just like a note in the calendar for OK, something I have to do six months from now.
OK, just put that there.
It’s out of my mind now.
List all my lists, organized into one big outline full of lists, and I just want to go through, I just want to simplify everything down.
So that imagine being able to reduce everything I need to care about in my life to a very simple booklet.
You know, instead of having like this whole like scattered pages everywhere, imagine your life in a little booklet, of “These are the things.” I mean, these are the things in my life.
OK, take care of my living situation, and take care of people, and that’s really the only things I really need to worry about.
So it maybe seems maybe too simple, and yet it seems like all the complicated things that we have, at some point they come out of something simple.
The complicated things that matter, that we need, are there because they connect and support simple things.
And the other complicated things, maybe we don’t need.
They’re simply unnecessary complication that we can live without.
So there’s something satisfying about ending each day with a life that’s a little simpler and clearer than I started it.
So it seems to me like this is a good way to spend my time.
So I’d love to hear from you, whether you’re doing something like this.
Do you find your life is too complex? And how do you simplify it?
#cleantheslate #lifeissimple #lesscomplicated