You know, so much about what I’m trying to do here comes down to the complexities of being simple.
The goal of a meaningful life, having a meaningful life myself, helping others to work together towards this goal: it really is a very simple thing, I believe.
I don’t believe we need to do anything particularly elaborate.
And it’s quite possible to have a meaningful life without even considering things in the way that I think about things, and without any kind of analysis, really, of any kind.
Meaning can come from many different ways, many different sources.
There’s many different ways to have this meaningful life.
And yet, as different as they are, I don’t think any of them are very complicated.
If there’s anything that you feel is a very complicated goal, a very complicated requirement that you have, I would bet that it can probably be simplified, reduced, to something much less complicated.
Some kind of complicated plan in fact feeds into a simple objective.
The idea of this meaningful life, it tends to really come down to love and some kind of meaningful work and a sense of alignment, aligning our lives with a higher value.
And all these things are very simple.
So why do I keep talking about it? Why does it take up all this space? Because it seems like the work is really focused on the distractions, the hindrances, the obstacles, the interference.
All of these are all the things that get in the way of the very simple objective.
And that’s where things get complicated.
The obstacles to the simple life are anything but simple.
The obstacles themselves, and the work of clearing those obstacles.
That work just seems to multiply in complexity.
The more complex these distractions are, it seems like they multiply beyond just their number.
It’s like they multiply by their combinations, by their exponential growth.
So if you have three things, they have three connections, and if you have four things they have twelve connections.
Maybe someone can check my math on that.
But the idea is, like, with every extra thing you add, every extra detail, every extra point you add to a system, it multiplies the complexity, not just plus one to the complexity, but multiplying it through its connections with everything else.
So I felt this to a small degree today just taking one more step on clearing out my possessions, trying to sort everything down to a simple, minimal selection so that I can have clear space, clear, open space free of cluttering obstacles.
And it takes a lot of work.
It takes a lot of time to sort through things.
And the decision fatigue of deciding with each object, one after another, how this will fit in, or, if it is decided to pass it on, how will it be passed on, and finding a place for it, finding a category for it, finding- determining its fate as one of my possessions.
So this work is- this is complex work.
It is busy work.
And I’ve realized today that I need to dedicate more time to this, and I’m looking at this as being something that will be a good weekend activity, a good focus for my weekends, for any free time I have on weekends, to work on this paring down and clearing out and organizing and simplifying.
Because the results are very satisfying.
For all the efforts of starting this process, once it starts going, each step forward leaves me with a more clear space, so that the feeling of clutter and distractions and interference in my life is just a little bit replaced by that feeling of open space and fresh air to breathe.
So this work is, in so many ways, at the heart of what I think is important. Clearing the physical distractions is what I was working on today, but of course, all the mental, emotional, and habitual clutter is, I believe, really the main thing that is blocking us from living that simple, meaningful life.
So, one day, one step, one less piece of baggage, and one more breath of fresh air.