Simplicity and minimalism II

Imagine a blank slate life.
Imagine that you have sort of this baseline of your life where you really don’t need to do anything.
I like stripping everything down to this baseline.
It’s almost like a bare canvas, or like having a a clean desk, that feeling of bringing everything down to the most basic level.
And then you can add the things that you want.
Instead of starting with this whole cluttered life and removing pieces: that’s one approach that we can use, just we look at the big mess of distractions and things going on and try to pick out some things that we can remove.
But another approach to decluttering is you just completely clear everything out and move it aside, and just imagine this blank slate and then you add just the things that you want to add.
So blank slate life: you could imagine you really don’t need to do anything.
Imagine a baseline of nothing.
And then you can add, OK, you’re gonna have eating and sleeping, maybe cleaning, and then that’s like your absolute minimum in order to survive.
And do you need to do more than that? Well, OK, maybe you want to add some exercise, and you probably need some way to make some money so that you can support this basic life.
And well, what else do you really need? It seems like other than that, we can just spend our life with our friends and family and just appreciate life.
There doesn’t seem to be much more we need to do than that, and everything else is something that we choose to add.
But rather than starting with it as like a defined thing, automatically we have all these things, I like this idea of starting with nothing and then adding piece by piece.
And we may find that we like to do a lot of things, so it may end up coming back to the same kind of complexity that we have, or almost.
But at least we’re choosing it.
We can choose to do the things we want in life.
Really, it seems so common to just believe that the way that my life is is the way it has to be, for various reasons, just automatically.
But so much really is up to us.
There may be constraints in one way or another, but they seem to not usually be as strict constraints as we often imagine.
So we do have the ability to design our lives, I think a lot more than most of us actually do.
So another part of this getting back to simplicity is getting back to nature.
And nature, I find, is very helpful for bringing out this sense of simplicity in life.
Just going for a walk, the simplicity of walking.
And this discipline is great too, because when you’re walking it feels like, well, I’m not being productive with my time.
I’m just walking.
I go out, and then I come back.
What are you achieving? You’re just going for a walk, appreciating the environment around you, and you don’t need to actually be able to write it off as productive time and be able to defend how you use your time efficiently.
You can actually just go for a walk and spend some time in nature, and that in itself can be a perfectly good use of time.
So appreciating nature, I find that very helpful.
And also just it almost just kind of trains me.
Nature trains me in this way of thinking where I don’t have to worry about a lot of the things that fill the human mind when we’re dealing with all kinds of complex things in work and human affairs and all this kind of complexity and all these kind of abstract thoughts.
Nature helps to bring things back to the basics and focus on those.
And finally, one thing I really like about minimalism and simplicity is that it really combines- there’s discipline and creativity.
It really unites it.
It’s like a full game, a full operation, that includes our whole being.
It is about training and self-control and learning how to discipline ourselves, but at the same time it also brings out this sense of creativity, of we have control over our lives.
We have the ability to choose our lives, and we can make our lives into what we want.
And removing the complexity and distractions that are like filling our lives, sometimes like weeds, or just like an overcrowded room: we clear that out, and then we have the space to be able to make choices to design our life and make it the way we want to be.

#simplelife #blankslatelife #simpleliving

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