Recently, Heather of Simple, Green, Frugal gave a talk on Voluntary Simplicity and it really got me thinking. The general crux of her post was that you need to decide what things in your life you really like and what things you really hate, and then find ways to increase the former and decrease the latter.
For me, the first group would include things like drinking tea and coffee, preferable with one or two very close friends, in the middle of the afternoon; reading a good book; cooking fresh meals from scratch, and knitting and sewing. The latter group would include working (well. . . not everything about working, but certainly the paperwork, office politics, faculty meetings, grading essays), waking up early, waiting in lines, putting things away and driving. I've been thinking a lot about this lately and ways to do more things I love and fewer things I hate. I think the truth is that a good deal of my time is spent doing things I neither love nor hate, things I nothing, like watching trashy TV shows and aimlessly surfing the Internet in a futile way to self medicate my exhaustion and frustration. I think it's time to start practicing more awareness of what I do with my time and finding things that I can painlessly eliminate.
I wholeheartedly agree. My wife and I are going through some very serious trimming down of our lives. The termination of 8 years of self-employment and the acceptance of a job requiring relocation away from our children and grandchildren has motivated some serious simplification. I can add one clarification to your post that we've found...some of the most important simplifications aren't the ones that can be done painlessly. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDelete