Simple Living

Focus is Saying No

December 14, 2011

in Simple Living

In the past I used to say that I never had enough time to do every­thing I wanted to do. Now, after hav­ing said it enough times through the years I real­ize how true that state­ment is. I will never have enough time to do every­thing I want to do, because it’s easy to scale desires. It’s impos­si­ble, how­ever, to increase the finite amount of time I will have on this planet.

Yes, I can always increase my chances of liv­ing longer by liv­ing bet­ter. But it doesn’t take away the fact that my life – my life, your life, every­one else’s life – is lim­ited. You have x num­ber of sec­onds, min­utes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and that’s it.

I’m reminded of some­thing Paul Bowles wrote in The Shel­ter­ing Sky:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finite­ness of life. It’s that ter­ri­ble pre­ci­sion that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inex­haustible well. Yet every­thing hap­pens a cer­tain num­ber of times, and a very small num­ber, really. How many more times will you remem­ber a cer­tain after­noon of your child­hood, some after­noon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even con­ceive of your life with­out it? Per­haps four or five times more. Per­haps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Per­haps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Con­tin­u­ing with the thought that not all clut­ter is bad, and not all declut­ter­ing is good, comes the nat­ural thought that some things are worth tak­ing up space in your life.

I love books. But I want more books than I have space to keep them, so I have to con­sciously curate the books I let into my life. eBooks are a grow­ing option; vol­umes which used to take up an entire shelf can now eas­ily fit into the space of an iPhone. But there are books I read for their con­tent, and there are books I want to keep for their being­ness. A book as not only con­tent, but a book as an expe­ri­ence within itself, from the design of its cover to the smell of its pages, from the abil­ity to read printed ink to the plea­sure of flip­ping through paper leaves.

There are things that take up space and sim­ply take the space, and there are things which take up space and add to the space around them. Not all clut­ter is bad, not all declut­ter­ing is good, and some things are worth tak­ing up space in your life.

The beauty of min­i­mal­ism is that by con­sciously hav­ing less in your life, you thereby give more space to the things you have, and they gain more con­se­quence as a result. A yel­low flower hung amongst a wall of flow­ers becomes a thing lost, but the same flower dis­played against an empty wall becomes all the more striking.

Talk­ing with a friend about her declut­ter­ing efforts got me thinking.

The new room

Declut­ter­ing is more dif­fi­cult when it’s a one-off event rather than a lifestyle. Min­i­mal­ism – a clutter-free life – is a a mind­set as much as it is an aes­thetic choice, and a lifestyle inas­much the mind­set informs your day to day choices.

But min­i­mal­ism is a per­sonal choice; do it because you want to and because it makes you feel bet­ter, not because you think you should. I love min­i­mal­ist design, I’m par­tic­u­lar about neat­ness and clean­li­ness, and I’m com­fort­able with the essen­tial less, so min­i­mal­ism suits me fine. My min­i­mal­ism is also dic­tated by con­straints; I live in a house with four other peo­ple, one of them shar­ing the same room with me, so I just have less room for stuff.

I’ve bought maybe two to three books since my girl­friend moved in with me, and not for want of desire. If I had a large house, I’d def­i­nitely have a huge library. But I’m con­strained by the small apart­ment I live in, and because there are only so many books that can fit, I have to con­sciously curate the books that I buy.

What’s also impor­tant is that I rec­og­nize the lim­i­ta­tions to this lifestyle. Where I have no prob­lem throw­ing things out, I some­times throw too much away and regret it after­ward (I deeply regret throw­ing out my first man­ual Nikon SLR cam­era). I also rec­og­nize that some­times there is great plea­sure to be had in keep­ing things of sen­ti­men­tal value which you can enjoy years down the road.

A New Room

July 4, 2010

in General,Simple Living

My girl­friend was look­ing for a new place to stay, but instead of hav­ing her rent a room, I con­vinced her to come stay with me (yeah I know, big life change right?). It meant I had to com­pletely re-design my room, which was really set up for just one to stay and work, not two.

I had two main goals for the re-design, which informed everything:

1. It had to com­fort­ably accom­mo­date the liv­ing and work­ing spaces for two.

2. It had to be as sim­ple as pos­si­ble, in form and function.

The Old Room

This is what my room looked like prior to the re-design.

Old room

The wardrobe and sin­gle bed were really set up for only one.

Bookshelf

The main anchor of the room was this book­shelf which took up the most space and atten­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, I real­ized from the begin­ning that it had to go, it was tak­ing up way too much room and I couldn’t maneu­ver any­thing new around it.

I also real­ized that no mat­ter how much I tried, the new room wasn’t going to fit every­thing I already had and still have space left for hers. That meant I had to go through a heavy, nuclear-level de-clutter.

Empty shelves

Empty shelf

De-cluttering my books took the longest time. I pared down my col­lec­tion to the ones I absolutely wanted to keep, and these were trans­ferred to a tem­po­rary shelf in the liv­ing room (it was inter­est­ing how few books were really essen­tial and how obvi­ous which ones they were).

When­ever I come back from over­seas, I like how much clar­ity I gain about what’s impor­tant and what’s not. I pack light, so some­times all I have is a book to enter­tain me – some­times not even that, so I’m forced to watch and lis­ten to what’s around me, be present and to think.

I also make it a point to check and respond to email min­i­mally if it’s a work trip, and to not use the inter­net at all if it’s a hol­i­day. It’s refresh­ing how all the infor­ma­tion that clam­ors for my atten­tion, which seems so essen­tial back home, just fades away into the back­ground with­out consequence.

It makes me won­der again, how much of my dig­i­tal clut­ter is really essen­tial. I’ve become more keenly aware that there’s a real line between con­sum­ing and cre­at­ing, and while I’m doing one I can’t be doing the other.