The Art of Simple Living Minimalist Living, Decluttering and living in focus with your Life Purpose
Gilbert Ross
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CONTENTS CONTENTS .................................................................... III FOREWORD................................................................... IV
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS SIMPLICITY? ....................................................... 1
SECTION TWO: SHIFTING GEARS
NEEDS & WANTS ............................................................. 5 10 BELIEFS TO LET GO OF ................................................. 13
SECTION THREE: ELEMENTS OF SIMPLICITY
SPACE AND TIME ........................................................... 30 ELEGANT CHOICES ......................................................... 38
INFORMATION .............................................................. 42 ORGANISING ................................................................ 46 LESS DOING .................................................................. 49
SECTION FOUR: SIMPLE LIVING IN PRACTICE
SIMPLICITY AT HOME...................................................... 53
SIMPLICITY AT WORK ................................................... 60 SIMPLICITY IN LOVE...................................................... 67 SIMPLE PARENTING ..................................................... 76
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ...................................................... 86
Foreword Our lives have become increasingly complex in a fast-paced, consumer-driven & hyper-connected society. We follow hectic, stress-laden lifestyles and we are swamped with too much information. In short, we need to simplify,simplify, simplify! We need to learn, or rather re-learn, the art of simple living. Many people are becoming more aware of this and are taking bold steps forward, towards more conscious living, minimalist lifestyles and simplifying their day-to-day living. This book is simply a guide to help people make this transition. It provides valuable insights into how to change your beliefs and perceptions – a key ingredient for transformative change – and practical step-by-step tips on how to simplify, declutter and focus on those things essential to our life purpose. The book is an edited transcript of my online course on Udemy.com which can be found here: https://www.udemy.com/the-art-of-simplicity-focusproductivity-freedom/
SECTION ONE
BOOK TITLE
INTRODUCTION
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1 What is Simplicity?
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful” John Maeda – The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
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ust close your eyes for a minute and go through a typical day in your life. What do you see? Is there struggle? Are you trying to cope with too many tasks at the same time? Too much information? Have you got a long list of pending chores and side projects that have been left unfinished for a long time? Now stay there with your mind and imagine another day in your life in which you are managing only one thing at any one time and you are well focused on it. Your to-do list is looking healthily short or bare. Your mind, your desk, your house and your life in general are uncluttered. You have both physical and mental space and you are relaxed, serene and as light as a feather. All the rest falls into place. Your thoughts are clear, your decision making flows easily and you wander through your day without unnecessary hassle and struggle. You have shifted gears and now you are doing more with less. This, my friends, is the art of simplicity in practice.
Living with simplicity means living your life without unnecessary stuff whether it is physical objects or mental debris. It means breaking free from the noise that accumulates in one's life and living with only the essential. It means, most of all creating space for life to fill in with peace, joy, happiness and success. Have you ever noticed how some people are constantly stressed and fatigued? Life seems to be constantly uphill? Have you noticed how some others move with light but effective strides forward? This is the difference between living life with simplicity and not. Simplicity is not an abstract concept. It is a practical way of living your day-to-day life. It is not some extreme way of living or living a secluded life on the fringes of society either. We do have common stereotype images of people who have gone to live in remote areas, completely detached from the outside world and left to their own devices, they literally survive on the food they catch or grow. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Self-sustainability as a chosen path is to be encouraged and admired. What I am saying is that the path to a simpler life need not be one that is drawn furthest away from your current one. It can start off with a few simple steps which when practiced will result in a very big positive leap forward in lifestyle and happiness.
What do I need to live with simplicity? The question in itself points us away from the real problem. We do not need anything, or perhaps very little in reality. We do not have to add something but rather shed some things away like old repeating habits and unproductive patterns of behavior and gradually change the way we value life. So the first big step towards to a clutter-free life is changing the way we look at things. We need to refresh our outlook and break
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The Art of Simple Living free from the mould, so to speak. It might seem trivial but it is the most important step forward and one that will bring with it the energy to take us from a congested, over-stressed lifestyle to one that is lighter, calmer and more open to our purpose. Changing our perspective on how we deal and respond to life's constant bombardment is what we will be dealing with in the following section. Although it is OK to jump forward and backwards freely throughout this book’s sections, it is highly recommended not to skip the next section as it is the foundation upon which the other parts of this book are built. One last thing before we can move to the next section - this book is not meant to expose shortfalls or unproductive traits in your life. You might come across a sentence and say, "oh gosh that's me!” Nothing wrong with that. What's important is that you understand that there are things that can be changed all for the better and good practices that will empower you to go through these changes surely and without too many hurdles.
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SECTION TWO SHIFTING GEARS
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2 Needs & Wants “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials”. - Bruce lee
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t the heart of living simplicity in your daily life is the idea of discarding the inessentials. The keyword here is inessentials. Simple living has a lot to do with learning to live with the bare essentials and learning to live with the bare essentials requires first of all that we identify what are those essentials in our life. At the same time, we realise and understand more closely what are those other things that are inessential to our real life progress and happiness and that only end up cluttering our spaces and complicating our lives after some time. More importantly, we also need to learn to let go, or in Bruce Lee’s words, ‘Hack away’ at the inessentials. This is something we will be seeing in following chapters. It must be noted that simple living is not about discarding everything. It is not so-called nihilism where everything is meaningless or useless and we should live in rags and feed on a few leftover crumbs. The idea is only about freeing ourself from the inessentials. This is closely tied to the realization that most of the things and ideas we have been attached to were only causing
noise, slowing us down and causing stress and fatigue. For instance, you will be surprised to know that simplicity lives side by side with abundance! Why? Because living a simple life is one where you are not weighed down by things there are effectively inessential to your happiness. This creates space for more rewarding and authentic things to flow into your life thus creating abundance. Abundance by the way is not an over-supply of goods but rather an always-available supply of those things that are most needed for your life's purpose. So how do you know what is essential and how do you distinguish it from the inessential? This is a pertinent question to ask. Although a long list of items can be drawn which could tell you which things are essential and which aren't - such a long long list is ultimately not required. First of all what is inessential for one person could be essential for someone else. Secondly, once you start becoming more aware of your general lifestyle habits and consumption patterns, your perspective starts shifting and it will start becoming more clear what is essential to you and not. In other words, you will start becoming more conscious of your real needs as against your wants and desires. Here is a very important thing I suggest you do as an exercise before you continue reading about the difference between needs and wants. Grab a pen and paper and write down a sample list from an inventory of items you own and projects you have, if any. Not everything, just a sample from your clothing, gadgets, accessories, furniture, things you keep stored away, projects and ideas you are working on and even monthly subscriptions. Next to the list of items draw two columns - one titled ‘Needs’ and the other ‘Wants’. Start scrolling through each item on your list and make an honest evaluation of whether that item is essential or not. Is it really a need? Does it help you in achieving some long-
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The Art of Simple Living term goal or make your life essentially happier. If it’s a project or idea you are putting in time and effort in, ask yourself, do you have a natural passion and inclination towards that thing? Does it drive you? Take a minute or two to evaluate each item and the tick the column according to whether you think it’s really a need or a want. The main objective for this list for now is not to take action on it (although this wouldn't be a bad idea) but to have a visual cue in front of your eyes on how needs compare to wants in both quantity and quality. We are all aware that there is a difference between our wants and needs. There are some things you want and other things you need. Modern society, however, has totally blurred this distinction and has sold us wants for needs. Advertising was and still is a major player in all of this, constantly feeding us with subtle and not so subtle messages aimed at building in us a certain belief system. "You need these accessories to look totally awesome & hip and play the part of the modern urban super-cool dude or girl" "You need to have this latest gadget if you want to be on top of the game with your peers" You get the point. In reality people have a small number of needs and huge list of wants depending on the person, age and society she or he lives in. We grew up in a world in which has led us to believe not only that we want more things but that we actually need them! You might say - but hey I do understand what is the difference between wants and needs and I do in fact know that I don't need a new watch or a pair of Ray-bans but really want them. I'm sure of that but the thing is that most of the times we
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are not able to step out of the 'merry-go-round' but unconsciously follow its strong momentum. In other words, we go with the flow and follow the social demands of the day. So in practical terms we need to first become more aware that there is a strong pull dragging us into wanting more stuff or wanting more recognition, access or status. We are subject to this force everyday through peer pressure, advertising or life situations that lead us to believe we need something in order to get somewhere. This awareness may seem trivial but it is extremely important. It is the first big step towards living a simpler, lighter and happier life. Below is a list I had created for myself in the past in which I have seperated the wants from needs. This table shows a small part of an inventory of items I owned at the time and did a little bit of a quick analysis of which of the items I really needed or were essential to my life or not. The exercise originally served as part of a decluttering exercise but I later realised that it shed some light on my life's footprint in terms of things I owned or carried with me but which were inessential to my overall quality of life. Item
Need? Want?
25 Shirts 9 pairs of trousers 6 Pairs of shoes Printer Old files with Study Notes Music CDs Books
No No No No No
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
No Yes
Yes No
Comment I could have half or less I could have half or less Need 1 for sports & 1 casual Rarely print Very rarely to make reference to them. Occupying space All my music is digitised A valuable knowledge reference. I do give away fiction titles through.
So for instance we all have lots of clothing items. The reason for this is that we buy clothes we like but then we get tired of them and we purchase new stuff from time to time. Now some people do regular wardrobe cleanups. However the main driver behind a
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The Art of Simple Living wardrobe cleanup for many is not so much for decluttering or to part away from items that are inessential but more likely because they want to make space for newer, fancier items! As you see from the table I did not own many clothes items. OK this is just a sample and there were other items I have not included in the list such as polo shirts, sweaters, T-shirts, etc. But it's enough to get an idea. For example having 25 shirts is not really essential. Some fashionsitas will tell you - hey that's a bare minimum!! But is it truly? Same thing with trousers and shoes. The question is - if I had to take away half of those items or more how would my living be affected? The answer is straightforward really. It wouldn't debilitate me in anyway. You can say I would have fewer items to choose from and less choice means simpler decisions! I have also included things like a printer, Books and CDs because these are very common items people own and gather throughout the years. Are they essential? Take for instance a printer. Well if you constantly work with it or you work from a home office then I would say yes you need one. In my case it was there because it came with my desktop PC. I only used it a couple of times and that's it so it was most of the time occupying space and nothing else. CDs can be a harder choice because you can still use them and put them in your CD player from time to time. Technology however changes and media becomes superceded. I have been using digital media for some years. So having those CD racks was not only inessential but there again, a waste of space. Books were yet an even a harder choice since I love books. However I did a different sort of thing. Most of my titles are non-fiction and these can be referred to from time to time. As for fiction titles - I decided to give away these to friends and charity carboot sales since I do not read fiction twice (unless it's a very good title). This below table shows items I did not own but had been planning of buying or in case of projects doing. I basically did the same
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analysis as in the previous table. The list is a bit more varied. So let me run through a few of them. Following the same line of reasoning in the previous table you can come to the conclusion that buying a new gadget or new pair of sport shoes does not improve my life in any major or long term way. There were other things that I believe I needed. For instance changing my job since the job I was into was affecting my happiness and wellbeing. Devoting more time to relationship issues is also essential since it creates a space for growth and happiness. Starting a saving plan for my young daughter is also a need - perhaps not a basic one but a good one nonetheless. Buying a new apartment door was also a need rather than a want since it has to do with safety and security. Item
Need?
Change job Increase income by $400 per week More time for dealing with relationship Doing my Phd
Yes
Savings account for daughter Fix car dent
Yes
New apartment door
Yes
Want?
Comment
Yes
Unhappy with current job Would be helpful but not critical
Yes
Very important to sustain a simple happy life Not exactly a need but is in line with my purpose
Yes
Yes
Holiday to Canada
Yes
New sports shoes A new macbook pro
Yes Yes
Not disrupting performance or function adding security since current one is not strong nothing wrong with it but not necessary Old ones still in shape can be a cheaper laptop
So all this starts giving us a pattern that enables us to have a wider picture of the difference between needs and wants. We have in reality very few needs. In gross terms, basic human needs are a safe shelter, food, water and good healthy relationships. Of course I am not saying that we should be scraping off the poverty
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The Art of Simple Living line. What I am trying to show is that the majority of things that we buy, use, store and carry over the years are inessential to our core living. The whole purpose of this was to have a greater awareness that most of the things we consider as 'needs' are just wants. Keeping this in mind will help us stir away from being dragged into unconscious decision processes that ultimately translate into complex, stress-laden lifestyles. Another important thing besides being more aware of the difference between wants and needs in our life is to start forming the inclination to let go of your wants and of certain beliefs that keep you stuck to a certain pattern of behaviour and respone. This is what we will be seeing in the following chapter. There is a difference between being aware that something is inessential - or worse counter-productive - to actually letting go of that something. Letting go of something - such as unhelpful habits or objects - is most of the time not about letting go of the thing or idea itself but rather of letting go of a particular belief that leads us to be attached to it.
Here is a summary of the salient points covered in this chapter:
There are things and ideas that are inessential to our life's purpose
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Simplicity is about living with the bare essentials Living with the bare essentials does not mean living a mediocre life but oppositely means creating space for an abundance of life enhancing energies and opportunities There is a clear difference between needs and wants but wants are often sold to us as needs The first step is to become more aware of these differences and realize that wants will not in anyway increase our life's quality or happiness
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3 10 Beliefs to Let Go Of
“The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go” Steve Maraboli, Life, the truth and being free
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n the previous chapter we covered a simple but important idea: that of sifting between our needs and wants. The main purpose of this was to increase our awareness about the fact that we use a lot of our resources of time, energy, space and money on things that are ultimately inessential to our life purpose. These inessentials are fed to us as needs when in fact they are nothing more than wants. The art of simplicity has a lot to do with recognizing the essentials in our life and letting go of the inessential things that most of the time eat away our resources and render our lives more complicated and less meaningful. However recognising that there are things that are inessential to our purpose is not sufficient. We need to cultivate the mental disposition and empower ourselves to let go of them. Recognition is very important but moving from being aware to putting that awareness into practice is a very powerful thing indeed.
Also, what we really need to let go of the inessential things is to know which are those limiting beliefs, fears and ideas that make us attached to them in the first place. So let us get working on this straight away.
Limiting Belief #1 - I need to get or gain something to make my life better: This is the most common limiting belief shared by most people on this planet! There is always that constant belief in the back of our head that life is running us past and that we need to add something to be in a better position than we are now. We need that extra income, that better job, that wonderful relationship, that new body or new look which together brings us a new lifestyle. Ultimately a newer, better me. Of course there is nothing intrinsically wrong with changing your life or with making new acquisitions. The problem is not in the objects themselves but rather in our continuous dissatisfaction with our present life together with the nagging belief that we can only change it by adding something else on top of what we already have. This is closely linked to the previous chapter's topic regarding needs and wants. We saw how needs are different than wants but this distinction is often blurred making us want or believe that we 'need' more stuff to be somehow better. The belief that we need more stuff to be better is a misguided one. But not only that; It makes our lives less simple. First of all it affects us directly because we add more physical clutter in our surroundings - gathering more objects we only use for a short while. It also affects us indirectly by creating a certain background anxiety fueled by the constant need to seek out for things that we believe will take us from where we are now to where we want to be.
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The Art of Simple Living The anti-dote for this belief is to root ourselves in the idea that we have all we need right here, right now. It might be a bit difficult to see. You might say “What? How can I have all I need when my brain is listing a tall order of things I am currently short of?" Yes that is the simple truth. You have already the right ingredients for happiness, contentment and living out your life's passion. Although it's a truth that may be a bit rough to grasp in the beginning, it's a truth that can be felt and understood. Your heart already knows it. It's only your mind that is constantly distracting you from it. You do not need anything more to be better. You just need to clear out the noise and align with your true purpose your essentials. This is when the magic of simplicity starts working wonders.
Practice: Find a quiet time during the day - could be in the morning, lunch breaks or late evenings. Think about all the things you believe are conducive to your goals such as for example - more money; a better job; a bigger house; a nicer car; a new gadget; a fitter body; relief from a physical ailment; reconciliation of broken relationships and so on. Now think of why you think you need these things. Be honest. Dig deep. You may hop on from one reason to another but if you dig deep It will always lead to the same road - self-realization. In other words being aligned to your life's purpose and doing what excites you. Now think again. Are these things like financial freedom, cars, status and so on REALLY conducive to selfrealization? The answer is no, not really. And this is not a bad news. Actually it is a powerful liberating idea that we can become self-realized without having to constantly run after these things.
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Limiting Belief #2 - I need thinking to figure out my way: Thinking is at the center of human activity. We think all the time. We think in order to plan, solve problems, make arguments and communicate with others. However most of our thinking is not directed at anything particularly useful. It is wasted on day dreaming, 'what if' scenarios and many times reeling in on past episodes of our life. So thinking is both a tool when used properly but can also distract us.
Moreover, when we over-think or over-analyze situations it consumes our energies and rather than making us more clear headed it often takes us in the opposite direction - ending up lost in too many loose ends. The saying 'paralysis by analysis' comes to mind. In short thinking, or rather too much of it, complicates matters instead of simplifying them. Mastering the art of simplicity requires among other things, knowing that too much thinking is often not the ideal tool to reach a certain goal. Even in difficult life situations, when we feel the pressure of having to take a decision on something we are not quite sure of, over-thinking can become counter-productive rather than a helpful ally. The secret tool of simplicity is knowing how to use intuition and heart-centered decisions instead of thinking. Intuition comes from a deeper place than thinking - it comes from the heart. It uses less energy and gets straight to the answer without having to hop from one concept to the other like thinking. Intuition bypasses all the complex processes involved in thinking and leaps straight to the solution. It is a very powerful tool. People who have mastered the art of simple living use intuition very skillfully and intentionally. They know that intuition is
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The Art of Simple Living effortless and simple because it is centered on feeling and the heart. Of course we do need thinking to make plans or for instance make some logical argument. I'm not downplaying thinking and its usefulness. We need it to operate in this world. It's relying too much on it that we need to let go of. It's the idea that thinking is the only way we can figure out a problem. When we crash our head thinking about a problem, more often than not it consumes us and doesn't always lead us to the solution. Sensing where our heart is calling us to go is a much more efficient way of getting around a problem or situation. I am sure that you have experienced this many times. Problem is, we are too much attached to the idea of thinking.
Practice: Whenever you have a problem bothering you and feel the urge to think or analyze it - at first do so but be aware of the process. Take note, during and afterwards, how simple or complex your thinking is. Did it lead you to a straightforward solution? Did it create more questions or more uncertainty? Did it require time, effort or energy? In a similar situation, try to refrain from analyzing the problem. Be sensitive to how you feel about it. Relax. Open up for possible answers without thinking about it. Leave space. Allow it to be. With some practice you will start picking up certain 'signals' or intuition. Often, intuition comes when your mind is actually not thinking about the problem. The reason is that you would be creating space for your subconscious to feed in information, which is otherwise muted by mental chatter. It might take some time, but as most things it requires practice. One thing to be encouraged with is that intuition is a basic human ability we can all acquire with some patience and little effort.
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Limiting Belief #3 - I need approval of others to live peacefully: We are social creatures. We interact, communicate and form bonds with others all the time. It's natural. Very often our decisions and way of living is influenced by others - family, peers, partners and so on. This influence is born out either by other people affecting us directly for example teachers, parents, children and authority figures, or else by virtue of us seeking consent, approval or support of others in given situations. An example of this would be working within a company or organization. People within a work environment tend to seek the general consent and approval of superiors and peers alike. In simple terms, our decisions and actions are influenced or rather limited by whether we think they're going to be approved of by others. We feel we want to be liked and looked up to. We subconsciously require respect and acceptance by others. It happens in many social environments - at school, at home, in friends' circles, etc. Having the consent and respect of friends, family and loved ones is not a bad thing in itself. It's the hanging on to the belief that we must somehow have it in order to live peacefully and happily in life. This is not so in reality. Simple living gives us the freedom to enjoy acceptance and approval when we have it but not to constantly seek out for it when we don't. When the fear of other's disapproval or the desire for their approval hangs around in every single decision we take, we are bound to be limited in some way. It also weighs us down and makes our decision-making less simple.
Practice:
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The Art of Simple Living Recall some of your recent decisions, big or small, which involved some aspect of your future. Could be big as a house move or job change or a small as buying a little something for yourself. Try to remember as much as you can about the decision-making process. Recall the feelings and emotions you had surrounding those decisions. Do you see the need for other's approval in those decisions? Did you think of what others would think or feel about your decision? How strong was that influence? Now try to imagine or feel how more simple those decisions would have been without factoring in the approval of others.
Limiting Belief #4 - I need to be financially secure to live freely: This belief is a common distraction from the path to simple living. We think that we need to be financially stable before we start doing the things we are passionate about and in line with our purpose. I have been a victim of this belief for many years. We always tend to equate major life changes with changes in income and wealth. It’s like the only way we can follow our authentic dreams and leap out from the system is by a major financial boost. “When I have more money I will spend my time traveling and being inspired by art instead of being stuck in a cubicle”. However even though following your goals require financial support of varying degrees, the mistake is to assume that more money must flow in before even starting to embark on your real life journey or that financial boost is the end in itself. This belief creates conflicting views about your future and hence lack of simplicity. You might feel the inclination to follow an inner
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calling - for example pursuing your studies - but at the same time feel the pressure of securing income from a stable job.
Practice: Grab a pen and paper and scribble down all those dreams and projects you have left on the side because your finances or source of income took priority over them. For example a project that required a certain amount of time and hence conflicting with your full-time job. Or a pet project that required certain financing to kick start. The purpose of this exercise for now is to take stock of these projects and be aware of how the idea of financial security interferes with them.
Limiting Belief #5 - I need to do, do, and do some more: We are used to a culture of doing since we are infants. Society has deeply ingrained in us the idea that we need to do something to achieve something. There is always something we need to do: work, make money, make more friends, get a degree, do this, do that and do some more. You get the picture. What we rarely stop to question is where does all this doing take us? Does the frenetic non-stop everyday doing eventually lead us to a different point in our life? It's a good question to consider.
I can answer for myself. I have spent years working on endless projects and stuff, investing thousands of hours and energy into them. My doing was driven by the belief that it will lead me to a new level of living. After a couple of years, a tall list of failures, some bruises and a few important lessons learnt, I realized that all I was achieving with my frenetic non-stop doing was move lots of
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The Art of Simple Living energy around! I also realized that most of it was not aligned to my real talent and purpose in life and hence why it wasn't propelling me forward.
Maintaining balance in life and moving forward while doing less is an art - specifically the art of simple living. It took me some time but after I realized this it changed the way I see things completely. I recognized the counter-intuitive truth that you can get more things done by doing less!! Sounds strange but true. How is this possible? Simple. It's because your little doing is conscious, focused, in line with your purpose and your life essentials. You discard all those inessential to-do items and projects which are not your authentic goals but things you somehow think are means to an end.
Practice: Letting go of the belief that we need to do something can be difficult for some in the beginning. Some people get restless and feel they cannot be motionless for some time. This is OK. It's one thing being active and another thing being consumed by the belief that in order to make things happen you need to do something about it now. What you need to practice is to let go of this belief. For me this practice was most effective on Sundays. Why? Sundays should be a time for taking it easy and being with the family. However I always used to get these irresistible temptations to use that time to work on some of my projects. Time is limited right? So this was the best day to practice letting go of the urge to do something and practice non-doing.
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Limiting Belief #6 - My end goals are always somewhere in the future: When we try to solve issues and problems we think that the goal or solution is strictly somewhere in the future. We think that this is obvious because if the problem is in the present then a solution to it must come in the future by applying some thinking and putting in action some plan. Partly this is correct. The problem with this thinking is that it has pushed us into believing that goals themselves are always somewhere in the future whether just round the corner or in the long distant future. It makes us shift our attention to the future instead of the present - the right here, right now. We always think that our goals are still to be reached and our present is only an in-between stage. The funny thing is if that is so, then our present, our now, will always remain an in-between stage and never the end goal itself. Simplicity requires seeing the end goal as being right here in the present. Our life happens and runs only in the present. Surely enough, the only way we can reach our 'future goals' is through the present. Presenting it from another angle, when one is anchored to the present and not lost in the ocean of futures still to be, he or she are living life with and through simplicity. Decisions become less complex and less energy is eaten away thinking about future goals.
Practice: Think about all those goals, dreams and results you are waiting for as still to come or happen. More income from a new business venture, job prospects after finishing my degree, more people
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The Art of Simple Living liking me after I get a fitter, sexier body. Think about how well you are connected to those goals through your present moment. Are you wasting your present time by day dreaming or worrying about something that you believe you don't have and yet to come? or do you believe yourself to be already in a process of change, right here, right now in your present?
Limiting Belief #7 - I need to do things in a certain way (Compulsive behavior) : Compulsive behavior is when you believe you 'have' to do something following a subconscious irrational belief that something odd might happen if you don't do so. I'm not talking of complexes or disorders here but general and pretty common dayto-day behavior from most people on this planet.
I have been observing myself and others all my life and one thing I have learned is that people tend to follow compulsive actions in some way or another even if in the mildest degree. For example, you might feel that you shower or put on your makeup in certain ordered steps and feel something is oddly missing if you don't. You might not even be conscious of this mini-ritualistic behavior. You might be following a number of these compulsive behaviors throughout your normal day. The only problem with compulsive behavior is that it is selflimiting because you fail to see that you have many different ways to carry out a certain task or solve a problem. Self-limiting our choices causes more complexity.
Practice:
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How do you let go of compulsive behavior? As most other things, the key is awareness. Observe and be continually aware of internal compulsions when for example taking decisions. See whether your decisions are being influenced or limited by a feeling that you have to do something in a certain way and not another.
Limiting Belief #8 - I am not good enough (Letting go of self-criticism): Self-criticism very often comes in the form of negative self-talk. Self-talk is when we follow that internal chatter or internal conversation in our head such as "oh no I thought I would mess it up just like that other time" or "I'm such a failure. How could I have not seen this coming?". You get the picture. We self-talk to ourselves all the time without being conscious of it. Sometimes it's subtle or fragmented so it's hard to realize we are actually sending messages to ourselves.
Self-talk can be seen as a silly concept for some. How could we talk to ourselves without knowing? The fact is that up to a certain point the subconscious mind does not distinguish between what is real or not. It just follows the instruction inherent in the thought or sentence. This is ultimately how hypnosis works. The hypnotist 'talks' directly to the patient's subconsious and so the message is acted upon as if it were real. It's only when the conscious brain is active that the message is analyzed, discerned and possibly ignored. But the subconscious mind takes everthing into account. Hence when we criticize ourselves or self-talk negatively, our subconscious mind picks up some of those signals and processes them as if they were real.
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The Art of Simple Living This has the effect of limiting us or building blockages to action. Self-criticism can hinder us from following actions that are in line with our life's mission hence making our lives more difficult and complicated.
Practice: The good news is that not only can we let go of self-cristicism or negative self-talk but we can do exactly the opposite - Positive self-talk. If our subconscious mind can pick up and act upon negative chatter, then it can also do so with positive affirmations. And it does. So a good practice is to build the habit of mentally affirming positive and encouraging thoughts. A lot of people secretly use mental affirmations with much benefit in their daily life. This is not wishy-washy stuff but a simple way of hacking how our mind works.
Limiting Belief #9 - I am my role: Modern society has created more specialisations and more roles to fit those specialisations. Moreover, we even switch between roles in a single day. For example, from parent, to marketing manager, organizer in a social circle to blog author late in the evenings. In a way this is a good thing. The problem is when we believe that our role is identical to ourself. In short, we identify with that role. A lot of people identify themselves with their role at work. They get so tied to the idea that they ARE their role that it affects a lot of their decisions they take even outside work. This identification creates restrictions and difficulty when making choices. Simplicity is when our choices,
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even if little, are not obstructed by inner or outer noise. They are clean, elegant and effortless.
Practice: Think about a role you identify yourself with. Could be your job, your role as a parent, instructor, helper, writer or whatever it is that you have a solid self-image of. Take note of how you visualize yourself in this or feel about it. Try to imagine how it would feel to be dissasociated with it. Imagine how your life's decisions would be different without you putting that role into the equation. It might feel very strange at first but the mind can adapt quite easily and quickly. If you get the habit of dissasociating yourself mentally from your role, you will realize that there are other aspects of yourself you haven't allowed to express themselves before. You might find certain inner conflicts to resolve or untie.
Limiting Belief #10 - I'm running late (letting go of the ticking clock): Time is a constant in our life. We all feel its grip. We grow older, our children grow up in a flick of an eye and we have less and less time on our hands to finish off projects or actually start new ones. In short, time can be a ticking pain in the neck. Apart from our biological clock, our perception of time is greatly influenced by how intensely we experience change, or by how little we can actually manage it. Yet the pressure of time is to a large extent self-imposed by one or more of the following:
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The Art of Simple Living Mark deadlines and milestones in our head. Example: "I need to be debt-free by forty" We create multiple, simultaneously running projects in excess to what we can handle We lack good prioritizing - we get distracted by activities or projects which are not really essential We do not focus our energies on one thing We fail to delegate or outsource stuff to others
Practice: One good practice is to free out a day from your schedule or calendar. It could either be a weekend or a day off from work. This day should be left completely free from chores, errands, tasks or commitments of any type. Set out to just wander about or explore a park or museum. Do not wear any watches and if possible stay disconnected from the internet or mobile devices that notify you with pending tasks or awareness of time. Do not rush, plan or segment your day into parts. This will feel like a weird and unfamiliar territory at first, but trust me it is just fine. See how your mind naturally tries to measure time. The urge to look at your watch or time displays. Or perhaps thinking about
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tasks you should be doing or things left undone. At the same time tell yourself that it is perfectly OK to 'waste' time. You will not be missing anything critical. Last time I practiced this, I managed to completely lose the passage of time. I was immersed in my all day experience and eventually found myself refreshed and able to cope much better with time and work in the following days.
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SECTION THREE ELEMENTS OF SIMPLICITY
4 Space and Time
“Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” William Morris
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n this section we'll talk about the basic elements for simple living. These foundational elements are the core principles that will guide you towards a life of effortless doing and in line with your true purpose. In the section following this one, we will then look at how these elements of simplicity are practically applied in the major life areas such as work, home, money and relationships. But for now let's look into these key elements and have a clearer picture on the little secrets of simplicity. This chapter is about space & time - two important factors in a person's life that cannot be avoided - but can be managed wisely.
The Art of Simple Living
Elements of Space: Managing space is at the core of the art of simple living in practice because if our outer or inner spaces are cluttered with inessential stuff, we encounter anxiety, obstructions, complexity and lack of freedom. This is easy to see from experience. For example, having a cluttered working space or a room that looks like a tornado aftereffect will give you a bucket load of practical issues - such as things which cannot be found as they slip beneath mounds of other items or constant distraction and waste of energy as you have to shift things around in order to work or move about. Apart from affecting day-to-day practical issues, our environment space is also reflected in our inner space. This is the key idea behind minimalism. In minimalism art, design and architecture, clear spaces are considered to be of utmost importance. It is in fact called minimalism, because the amount and effect of objects within a space is minimal. This is conveyed through wide-open spaces, simple inobstructive design and clear surfaces. The outer simplicity then resonates within us to promote inner simplicity and so minimalist exteriors somehow give us a sense of inner peace and tranquility. Now although miminalism and simple living go very well hand in hand, you do not need to be a minimalist to live a life with simplicity. For instance, you do not need to convert your home into a minimalist one. This is not required although helpful. What is important is that our exterior space is managed in a way that it opens up, or at least doesn't negatively influence our inner space...and this takes me to the importance of inner space.
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What is inner space? What I mean by inner space is not a space clear from physical objects but one that is clear from mental debris - such as overthinking, worries and misconceptions. In the same way that a cluttered physical space causes practical problems, so does a cluttered inner space. If your mind is too occupied with dealing with an overload of information or your analysis of a situation conflicts with your heart's desires, a lot of inner noise is created instead of clean space. Inner space is created when we learn to let go of certain beliefs and misconception as we saw in the previous chapter. Or when we have simplified our outer space and life in a way that we have less confusion and our decisions are easier and clearer. French impressionist music composer, Claude Debussy was quoted saying "Music is the silence between the notes". On a close but parallel line, it can be said that "life happens in the silence and space between thoughts and things”. I'm not trying to create some Zen wisdom here but there is a verifiable truth that can be witnessed in real life. When we close or clutter our spaces, we are not allowing anything new to fit in and we are not allowing ourselves to move through it easily. Just like it's difficult to place new things or move about freely in an obstructed space, it's also difficult for instance to listen to our intuition and insights when our mind is cluttered with thoughts & worries. When there is a lot going on in your mind, you become withdrawn and consumed by your inner chatter. This is like blocking a space where fresh new creativity perhaps carrying a solution to a problem might flow in. This is why the previous chapter is an important one because it aims at hacking away those beliefs that block our inner spaces.
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The Art of Simple Living In section four we will also see how to practically manage space. Here is a quick preview of how inner and outer spaces can be managed better at different levels:
Physical space:
Declutter working and living spaces Discard stuff you no longer use Find a place for everything to store or pack Keep a simple but effective organising routine Buy only things which have high value / low maintenance
Inner space:
Let go of self-limiting beliefs
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Take a walk Spend time alone Disconnect and connect Meditate
Elements of Time: It's funny how we are constantly running against time, running
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The Art of Simple Living out of time or running away from it but we are hardly ever in time or with time. The pressures of the modern world are partly to blame of course - dealing with multiple deadlines and catching up with multiple tasks all the time. But a good part of the reason why we see time as a villain is because we forget to simplify. Simplification is a way to manage both space and time. For example, the same rule of simplicity - that of keeping only the essentials and hacking away the inessentials applies exactly in the same way to time. We have to evaluate our time better and see how to manage our time according to tasks, projects and work that are essential to our truest life progress or not. Hence the word here is priorities - a magical word in time management. For example as I’m planning and writing this chapter on a Saturday morning I have a medium size lists of items to tick off for the day - working on an other project, errands, paying bills, etc. My first task of the day after early breakfast was this one because it takes priority over other identified tasks - it’s part of a project that is essential to my life purpose, my passion, sharing knowledge, perhaps even financially.
Priorities and MITs How many projects are you committed to? How much extracurricular stuff do you do? It’s impossible or even counterproductive to try to do it all. You need to say NO and value your time. The following is one of the best-tried and tested methods to prioritise tasks and simplify your schedule. Basically it centres around the choosing and focusing on your MITs or most important tasks. This is in line with the very important idea to focus on one important thing at any time and complete it.
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So every evening or early morning you can start writing your MITs for the next day or for that same day if it’s early morning. Ideally you should have one really important thing to complete that day but an average of two or three is fine. I usually have about two. These MITs have to be the goals or projects that are essential to your life purpose or minor goals that support goals in line with your life purpose. You should always focus on one goal at a time while excluding all the others, most importantly tasks that might potentially distract you such as using mobile devices, email, Instant messaging and others. The target is to always finish the MITs you have identified first. The other tasks can be batched up and processed in one go or in bulk sessions. It is imperative to start from the MITs first. Perhaps sometimes it’s really impossible to complete your MITs in one session because of unforeseen urgent things that might come up. That’s fine. Just do what you have to do and get back to focus on your MIT. This has to be the general rule. Apart from the daily MITs, which by the way you can record in the note-taking device of your choice, be it a simple note pad or voice recording on your mobile device, you can create a weekly review. In the weekly review, you set up your MITs for the following week - that is the most two or three important tasks for the whole week. One of them could be completing a project or finishing a chapter in a book you are writing. That would be an MIT for the whole week. You can then break it down into smaller chunks that become one of your daily MITs during that week.
Conclusion For now it is relevant to note how simplifying our life is so central
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The Art of Simple Living to time management and for managing our outer and inner space. It will pave the way and make it easier to simplify more aspects of our life. We all have the same amount of time in a day, week or year; But managing our time as part of simplifying our life in general will make a difference between being a victim to time's merciless crunch or navigating through our day with much less stress and friction.
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5 Elegant Choices
“Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves” Edwin Way Teale
remember those summer holidays as a child with my neighborhood friends playing all sorts of outdoor games in the basking afternoon sun or warm summer evenings. The games were bare and simple as they could get but, hack, they were fun!! Catch, red light and green light, hide and seek, marbles, tag - the list goes on and on.
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When it came down to choose who would be the seeker or the captain of the crew, the piggy in the middle or whatever needed to be picked out, the process was as simple and as fun as the game itself. It involved things such as simply counting a number in a circle or the phonemes in a rhyme, a blindfolded spin and point or perhaps there would be the kid who would spontaneously raise his hand and offer himself for the role. Choices were easy - there were no complex decision-making processes, no algorithms and no brainstorming. It was just flowing with the energy and fun.
The Art of Simple Living More than anything else, the choices were elegant. Why elegant? If you google up elegant or elegance, you are given this definition: “Pleasingly ingenious and simple" (when said of a solution to a problem or scientific theory). And that’s what some of the choices we made when we were young were - pleasingly ingenious and simple. They were elegant. We all know how things change as we grow up. Responsibilities add up, relationships become more complex or fragile, the stakes become higher and our decisions more consequential. In short our choices seem to be a hundredfold harder than when we were young. The keyword here is ’seem’. When you think about it, choices are hard or easy depending on information and perspective.
Here are some of the factors that can make a choice harder than it actually is: Wrong beliefs and fears - we have seen this in the previous section Lack of information about the subject - we are scared of what we don’t fully understand Lack of perspective on the wider picture - when we look at a problem from a tiny window Uncertainty of outcomes - not knowing the future is obviously the main thing with difficult choices Conflict between rational mind and intuitive heart - not having a clear path of action
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This is why many of our choices in childhood were elegant. Our heart and mind were clear from too many beliefs and fears, we weren’t too much concerned with outcomes and our mind and heart were in sync.
You might say, yes but children’s problems and responsibilities are much less than that of an adult. I would say not really. Our problems and responsibilities level up with age and experience. What we have mostly changed is our internal bearing. We think, analyse and evaluate more and as we saw previously this brings about noise and lack of clarity. We also form layers of beliefs of how the world is or how it should be. We have more expectations and hence more limitations and hesitations.
We do not move as freely because we forgot to be simple. Living a life with simplicity entails relearning to make elegant choices or rather unlearning all the inessentials we gathered through the years and turning back to the bare essentials.
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The Art of Simple Living Here are a few things to keep in mind regarding making choices in life:
The outcome is always unknown for everyone. What remains is your power, your strength and your will to move through the change. When your thinking and analysis interferes too much with your heart’s deeper calling - choices will be harder It’s easier to make a choice based on feeling & intuition rather than thinking. Analysis & thinking should be used to evaluate a choice and refine it but not to make it More information can help you gain more perspective on a given problem but ultimately it is being aligned with your heart that will drive you forward
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6 Information
“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life” Wu-Men
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nformation is a double-edged sword – It can be crucial for survival or saving millions of lives yet on a personal level it can be a source of stress or misguided decisions. We are heavily bombarded with information all the time. We all know that. We were already concerned that we had too much information before the Internet and mobile era - go figure that! The Internet, and specifically the mobile internet has ripped open another universe of information. In the proximate future we will face another revolution - the internet of everything where we would basically have multi-media & multi-layered sources of information seeping through everything - your fridge, your home appliances, the supermarket trolley, paintings, well any object imaginable.
The Art of Simple Living We can only start to conceptualise how information will be yet even more ubiquitous and ever-present in our lives. Imagine picking up a packet of cereals in the supermarket and your wearable device will display information about the packet and how its health benefits and prices compare to other products and on which shelves they can be found. It will give you a summary of other similar products you still have in your pantry and their expiry date. It will gather information about how such a product was consumed by people of your same blood type, medical history and lifestyle. Well you get it - we wouldn't be navigating through a physical world only but through data about the physical world. My brief excursion into the near future of the Internet only serves to make the point about how information can be both helpful and a distraction at the same time. As with choices in the previous chapter, the problem with information is our personal approach to it. If it overrides us and causes complexity and confusion then we are using it unwisely. If we are using enough of it to simplify our lives and make things easier then we are using it wisely. The issue with information is that it can be a common source of distraction. Mobile devices are the classical example. How many times do we see others, and yes ourselves, texting or checking messages, browsing Facebook updates, reading and writing emails and so on. I do understand (up to an extent) doing that while you are in a waiting room with nothing else to do. But now we have stretched it to an extreme where we fiddle with our devices wherever we are - at the dinner table, while supposedly enjoying a walk with family, while others are talking to us, and so on. Is all this necessary? I don’t think so. It’s mostly a habit. It’s social
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conformity to the idea that we have to look busy and on the ball all the time - catching the latest headlines and keeping tabs on everything. The truth is that it’s only shooting ourselves in the foot. We are making our lives even more complex and stressful. The art of simple living is about selecting the right information at the right time and using it in the right way. Sounds like a mouthful I know but in simpler terms it means using information in a ‘one shot one, on kill’ manner instead of letting ourselves be tumbled and spun around in it. We started this book with the idea that simplicity is about living with the bare essentials and discarding the inessentials. Our use of information needs to follow the same rule. Do not be buried under tonnes of information that you might never make use of or forget after a couple of days. We need to be selective and frugal with information as well. This doesn’t mean living a secluded and isolated life where we shut off all communication with the outside world. We just have to know the limits where information stops being useful and helpful and starts becoming distracting and increases complexity. In a typical day we are fed a lot of information through different sources and channels. Our online life has brought this to a new level especially with social media through Internet connected mobile devices. The average American adult spends and average of 5 hours a day just on digital media according to an eMarketer study published on June 2013. This number is still growing fast. We need to simplify and digest information more wisely. We will see how we can do this in a separate chapter. The good new is that it’s not all about going back to the Stone Age. We can
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The Art of Simple Living also use technology itself to help us filter and consume information in smarter better ways. Here are my two most valuable apps for simplifying my online life: Evernote and Flipboard. I’m sure that most of you are familiar with at least one of them. Basically Flipboard is a mobile app that gathers feeds from different online sources - News feeds, social media updates, Blog posts - and presents all that content in one place in a distractionfree magazine style format. So essentially instead of wasting time browsing through different sites and getting distracted by videos, banner ads and other things along the way, I simply flip though this mobile magazine and catch up with the important things I really need to keep updated with. Another highly valuable tool is Evernote. Evernote is a free tool through which you can create notebooks and notes about anything and keep in one place. Evernote can be accesses from a desktop and mobile device and will sync automatically. So I can create text, photo, video or audio notes on the fly wherever I am and have them immediately synced so I can access them from work, home or anywhere else. This has extremely simplified and saved time in my work and research.
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7 Organising “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated” Confucious
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have to admit that I was for the major part of my life, a very disorganised person. I never managed to keep things systematically in place and I was pretty bad at keeping tabs on my routine tasks in an orderly way. Confessions apart, I now understand what was the main problem with my lack of organisational skills. The problem was that I looked at organising as just another boring routine rather than as a skill to simplify routine and save time and energy. I was looking at it from the inside out rather than the outside in. So the question that I asked was: “does being more organised make us more free or more stuck to routines?”. I didn’t want to take it for granted because other people said so all my life. I wanted to ask the question for myself without any preconceptions or assumptions.
The answer of course is that it makes us more free unless we are not obsessed by it an do it compulsively.
The Art of Simple Living It makes us more free when you see it in terms of time and energy investment. You invest a little time and effort to put things back in place now, keep your bills and documents up to date and save an x% amount of time more later to organise all the mess and get to the bottom of it when a certain tipping point has been reached. That tipping point is a point in time where the time needed to put ALL things back into place is much greater than the sum of its parts. Or in other words, if organising your stuff day by day would have taken you a total of 8 hours in a month, after a tipping point has been reached, it would take you let’s say 11 hours to put everything together in one go. This is mainly due to increased complexity. Lack of organisation tends to increase exponentially because there tend to be destructive interference between objects. The example is moving content from one house to another in boxes. In one case, the boxes are all labeled and grouped according to room or type of object. In another case they are all random and unsorted. The amount of content is the same but which is simpler to unpack and resort? So the importance of organising in terms of simplicity is keeping the levels of complexity beneath the threshold - the tipping point. There is no standard dial or meter showing you where that tipping point is. Yes, it would be cool if there was an app for that but it’s almost impossible to quantify rationally because we all have different approaches and speeds in life. It’s something that you measure intuitively and through experience. The important point is to keep organised enough to keep beneath that complexity threshold. You do not need to overdo it otherwise it will push you off track. Even
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organisation itself needs to be kept simple and to a minimum. Don’t forget that it’s not for the sake of organising in itself but as a way of hacking simplicity in our life. Another important aspect of organisation is getting into the habit of doing it. It requires some getting used to and some fine tuning. It was like that for me. It didn’t come naturally and it certainly didn’t come after a single trial. It was a gradual habit forming. For me it actually started off from one place - the kitchen. I love to cook so the kitchen is a room I use often. I cook passionately but after I’m done it’s a total mess. So I started using a simple method of keeping everything in place on the go. That means I do not clear after a whole cooking session - since this can be too taxing in itself. I wash, pack and sort things while actually cooking. This is like breaking down the organisation session into smaller ones while in the process of actually using it. A close parallel is in IT with data transfer over the net. A file is not transferred as a whole in one go but is broken down into little tiny data packets that are transferred and then reassembled at the receiving end. So the process of breaking down the file into small bits simplifies and speeds up the process.
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8 Less Doing
“Less is more” Mies Van Der Rohe
ne of the central themes in simple living is in fact the art of doing less (or the art of less doing). This idea although counter-intuitive to most people in the west, is not new and is gaining more interest and popularity through the media. It didn’t actually hit stardom as an idea because we have ingrained in us the concept that doing less means avoiding work and being plain lazy or lethargic.
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As mentioned in the previous chapter, society has installed in us the habit of being or rather looking busy and on the ball in whatever we do. In so doing we started drawing a picture of ourselves as busy automatons in an increasingly complex social environment. However, normal 'busyness' or business is most of the time moving energy around and lifting a cloud of dust which when settles leaves nothing but more resources of time and money in the hands of the few…and guess what? Most of the time it’s not you! The key secret in the art of simple living is in fact getting more
done by doing less. Paradoxical as it may sound it’s practically true. Naturally we follow the ‘obvious’ thinking that the more we do, the more productive we are and the more things get done. It can’t be farther off the mark. Yes of course the more work input in a project the faster it approaches completion if that is the only thing you are focusing on and it is in line with your true purpose and passion! But this is not the average daily snapshot from a person’s calendar is it? We are more likely to be dealing with multiple tasks and projects, the majority of which we have no authentic passion for. We are inputting more work and energy in things that not all of which are essential to us. So yes we are doing more but getting less. What about if we turn the picture around? We are working less but focused on just one or two things we are passionate about and is essential to our life purpose. Wouldn’t that be getting more done with less work and energy? Not only that. Let’s admit for a while that no matter what there are still some tasks that need to be done even though they are not essential to your life purpose. Let’s face it I don’t believe cleaning the garage or washing up the dishes is in line with anyone’s life purpose but needs to be done. Yes it can also be done not by working harder or faster but by working smarter. And there is a lot we can do in this direction - from knowing how to smartly prioritise, delegate work, outsource or use smart tools to help us get the job done with less work as we keep focused on our essentials. The idea of smart tools and outsourcing resources is a topic that will be dealt with in the chapter about simplicity at work and
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The Art of Simple Living business.
Summary: Doing more doesn’t necessarily mean getting more things done A lot of what we do is just about moving energy about with no thrust forward Focusing on what is in line with our life purpose will give us much more by doing less Those to-do items which are not essential for our life can be prioritised, bundled, outsourced or carried out by using smarter tools and procedures
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SECTION FOUR Simple Living in Practice
9 Simplicity at Home
“The ordinary arts we practice everyday at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest” Thomas Moore
implicity starts at home. If the home you live in is chaotic, out of order and in desperate need of some organising then this might be a reflection of some aspects of your life or more importantly it might be reflected back into your life at some point. Our home is were we return to for comfort, to reset from a hard day of work or a simple a place where we gather with members of our family. Simplicity at home is an efficient way to keep balance and harmony between our family and ourselves. It is also an important starting point to cultivate and reinforce simplicity in other areas of our life such as work, business and relationships. OK Let’s move straight away to see how we can start simplifying our homes in practice.
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Room Priority: One very important rule of simple living in practice is: Always focus on one thing at a time and prioritise what’s most important. Simplifying our home follows the same rule. If we look at our house as a whole structure to be decluttered and simplified
in one go - then the task will seem enormous and discouraging. If on the other hand it is dissected into separate rooms which can be tackled one at a time and in order of priority, the simplification process will be simplified. Every home is different than others in size, orientation, number and purpose of rooms and also systems or rules used by family members in the house. Yet of course the majority of homes throughout both the western world and the rest of the world, have a lot of things which are pretty much in common. There is always an area to cook and/or eat as is the Kitchen, a place to sleep as are the bedrooms, a general living space and a lavatory. These are the core essential room units in a home. You might have a big house with lots of rooms with different purposes such as a recreational room, meditation room, sewing room, kids playroom and so on, but the above are the ones which we most frequently use and inhabit. Hence it is practical to give them priority and to start simplifying our homes by looking into how to simplify these rooms first. So essentially we should start with a focus on the rooms that are used all the time hour by hour and seek to simplify and declutter them first before any other room.
Decluttering the Inessentials: In chapter four we saw how cluttered spaces are an obstruction to simplicity and conversely how organised and clutter-free spaces are conducive to simpler living and to the opening of inner spaces thus bringing clarity, lightness and happiness in our day to day life. So how and what can be decluttered? Isn’t it the same as spring cleaning or general house cleaning? In many ways, yes. The difference is that while spring cleaning or general house cleaning are aimed towards just clearing away things and
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The Art of Simple Living cleaning, the intention behind decluttering is to put your space in line with the basic rule of simplicity: discarding the inessentials and keeping only the essentials. Moreover it is not just a one time thing - that is done only once and after which we start accumulating inessential stuff again. If we turn the art of simple living into a way of life, then decluttering itself will become minimal and there would no need to be done often since we would be maintaining an organised and mindful environment around us. First of all it is recommended to tackle one room per week or if you have some more time on your hands, perhaps a room every 2 to 3 days. Do not try to do all at once. Go slow but steady. Don’t forget that the first decluttering session is the heaviest one and most important. So be sure to take it in slowly and carefully. Pick on one of the important rooms: Kitchen, Bedroom, Living/TV room or bathroom. Start decluttering just one room for that week. Try to do 15 minutes a day. If you get carried away and feel like doing some more, that’s fine. In the beginning, skip the drawers and cabinets that are out of sight. Do those later. Focus in the things that are within site first. Start with the big things: Look around for the big and obvious like furniture or big equipment or boxes. Which furniture is basically useless and only taking up space? Which ones do you love and find an essential part of your house’s character? We naturally feel reluctant to discard furniture perhaps because it costed us money or has other value of some sort. But these reasons alone are no justification if you want to simplify your home and your life. Be practical. Evaluate if the furniture is just there doing nothing practically useful and whether more space and lightness is created by actually removing it.
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Clear all flat surfaces: Countertops, desktops, tabletops, etc. Get a trash bag and start removing all the papers, little junk and things that accumulate but you don’t even remember their origin or purpose. Be especially merciless with paper. Do not let it take over your space. You really have to be strict and fight for your space. You can trash the stuff straight away or put them in boxes to give away to friends, family or charity if they have some type of value. The surfaces need to be clear as possible only to retain useful or important items such as a key tray or a family photo frame. When you finally come to the shelves and drawers, take everything out all at once. Work on one drawer or one shelf at a time. Once again have a trash bag or a give-away box handy. Start sorting through the pile one at a time. Pick up an item and make a decision whether to trash, give-away or keep. Put back what you want to keep in the drawer or shelf and arrange it nicely. Do this with all the items in the pile. An important tip is to be brutal with the first time decluttering sessions. If you hold back or you are not strict enough it will hit you back in the future. This is not easy because of emotional attachment to some items or because while we are picking up an item from the pile we get some nice memories back connected to a time when we bought or were using that item. Do not let this take you over you. Be merciless. Trust me, it will pay off later
If there are some things that you are really uncertain of because of practical value they don’t have now but might have in the future, put them in a ‘maybe’ box, label and store away. Be sure not to over-do this as in the end you will end up moving a pile of things from one place to another. In the case of kitchen appliances or utensils, I suggest you make an honest calculation on its usage. If it has been used between one to three times in a whole year (for example a pasta machine or a bread maker) then
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The Art of Simple Living give away. Anything which is used more than four times in a year can be kept if you deem it fit. Keep on doing this until all the room has been decluttered. Once finished move on to another room.
Simplicity Maintenance: Although decluttering rooms is a very big first step towards simplicity at home, the most powerful and effective way to keep things simple is creating a system that will stop clutter from accumulating. My favourite method is decluttering on the go. I started off this method from the kitchen. I love cooking and I cook a lot for my wife and daughter. It’s something I am passionate about. However, with too much passionate cooking splashed around, the kitchen ends up looking like war zone every time I cook. This did not make my wife happy of course. So I started keeping maintenance of things on the go. For example every time I finish using a plate, knife, utensil or pan, I quickly wash and put back in place immediately. It sounds strange but it’s actually so time and energy-saving. The idea is not new of course. It’s breaking down tasks into small chunks and clearing them out of the way as soon as possible. This method works and works very good. There are a lot of advantages to this method. To start with, you will not find a huge pile of work in the end such as dishes, messy floors, cluttered tabletops and so on. I do not see it as a big chore because it is interspaced between cooking - something I love doing. It was also good because I started the habit from the kitchen and I extended it into other rooms and in other areas of my life. Another method is having a place for everything and keeping everything in its place. This is pretty much an extension of the declutter on the go method. If for example you are about to put
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something down on a flat surface or you are taking off your shoes, clothes and stuff, think about where that item belongs. If it doesn’t have a place to be stored, find one and stick with it. Keep doing this every time as part of the decluttering on the go until it becomes a habit. Maintenance can be so much more powerful than clearing away in one big session. It’s easier, faster, takes less energy and most of all prevents things from falling back into disorder.
The Minimalist Home: I mentioned elsewhere in this book that it is not necessary to be a minimalist or have a minimalist home to be living with simplicity. Minimalism is a form of art, design and architecture. It follows the concept of beauty in simplicity and open clear spaces. The spirit of minimalism follows Zen philosophy together with the aim of creating inner simplicity through outer simplicity. You do not need to redesign your home into a minimalist one. In any case, if you have followed the decluttering and maintenance tips, that’s already a good step forward towards a minimalist home. At the same time you can perhaps turn one of your rooms into a minimalistic design or just follow certain minimalism design concepts so as to perhaps lighten up a bit your home.
Here are a few things you can do to: Minimal furniture and objects: We have seen this with decluttering the home. Minimalism might perhaps stretch a bit further by keeping furniture to a bare minimum. A living room might only contain a few essential furniture, such as a low coffee table, a couch and perhaps an armchair with a simple design.
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The Art of Simple Living Clear surfaces: This is of utmost importance in minimalistic design. Surfaces must always be clear so as to give an impression of clear open space. This idea has a lot to do with simplicity since clear spaces help the mind from not getting distracted by details and too many visual cues. It is about clarity, simplicity and focus. Quality over quantity: Having a minimalist home means objects have a minimal effect on a given space. So instead of having a lot of objects with no use and poor aesthetically quality, it’s rather better to have a few objects that are really nice, simple and useful. Accent decorations: Since minimalistic spaces are about clear surfaces, white walls and open spaces, sometimes it is necessary to ‘break’ the monotony with some subtle but beautiful decorations that blends well with the rest. My wife is particularly good at this. She loves creating these accent decorations herself. For example she used a thin sheet of wood that served as part of a furniture we gave away, to paint a beautiful relief with pastel tones and we put it in one of the corridors so as to break away from white washed walls. Another example is she took two of our daughter’s drawings that quite resembled the minimalistic and surrealistic painting of Spanish painter Juan Miro and framed them to a wall in our TV room so as to give a bit of an accent. They actually blended in lovely and people always leave a positive remark.
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10 Simplicity at Work
“Smile, breathe and go slowly” Thich Nhat Hanh
here is no doubt that work or business can be a major source of everyday stress whatever the job or the business may be. Tight deadlines, friction with colleagues, missed targets, frustrating client relations and much more can really get us screaming out for help at times. Things get complex and out of hand while the needle on our stress meter jumps up into the red zone. We have to break down and understand what are the most common stress factors and identify those that we can tackle together with systems that we can simplify and improve.
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Here is a short list of stress factors in work or business that can be acted upon.
Too many tasks and projects running concurrently: This is the top stress factor related to jobs and business alike, so we will take a closer look at it. You might have too much on your plate and you are expected to keep ALL things running smoothly
The Art of Simple Living and without hiccups. This is a common expectation with most jobs or running your own business. Many times bosses, managers, colleagues keep on dumping work on you without taking stock of all the other things going on. In a way they do not need to know as quite likely they expect that you handle it and prioritise your tasks since you are the only one who can have a global picture of tasks coming into your inbox. Some days we have everything under control and we cruise throughout the day with relative ease. Other days you might be losing the edge because of too many things and unforeseen circumstances mashing together. Here is where simplicity comes in very handy. Remember the MITs and chopping off the inessentials to focus on the essential tasks first? This is a good starting point. Write down all of your pending tasks, projects and upcoming tasks into a list. Which ones are the most important tasks? Which ones are in line with your job or business objectives? Which ones are critical for the long term success of whatever you are doing? These are your MITs and they should be given top priority over the rest. Focus on one of these tasks at a time and allocate the biggest share of your time and attention. There might be other urgent matters hitting you in the meantime such as urgent emails to answer, problems with an important client, a technical issue that is threatening to slow down a project and so on. These should be either attended to without spending too much time on them, delegated to other members of your team or bundled up together and tackled later. Another way of seeing it is that you can categorise tasks into three types: a) Important and urgent, b) Important but not urgent and c) urgent but not important. For obvious reason, the important and urgent matters should be tackled first. Important but not urgent tasks should be given more time and focus than
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urgent and non-imporant tasks while urgent and not important tasks should be either delegated to others or outsourced, addressed without spending a lot of time or bundled together and addressed later at a specific time - say allocating an hour to look into them. This takes me to another little secret I have used many times in my job and personal business but not so many people know about or else shy away from - outsourcing. We are blessed to live in an internet age where thousands of people with all the skills imaginable are ready to do tasks online at little cost. I am talking about freelancers which provide their services on online platforms. I have many times used freelancers to outsource those tasks which were urgent but not important or else were too time consuming thus distracting my focus from the MITs. A few examples of such tasks would be - doing some internet research, data input, collecting business email addresses within a certain industry to send to, doing a small write-up, designing something, fixing some technical bug in a website, SEO related task, doing a video intro, converting some text into a presentation. I outsourced all of these mini-tasks and more to freelancers for any cost between $5 to $50 on average. How do I do it? Depending on the urgency or complexity of the task I use any one of these online platforms: Fiverr.com: I have used this probably over a hundred times. You buy any services from freelancers for only $5. This is the beauty of it - all services are $5. Hard to believe but I got all of the tasks I mentioned before done from freelancers on this site alone. Freelancer.com: This is one of the most popular freelancer sites because it has been a few years around. Basically you post any job you want done and set a maximum budget you want to spend.
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The Art of Simple Living Freelancers will bid for the job and all you have to do is browse through their profiles and proposals and see which one is best fit considering their expertise, ratings, experience and cost. O'Desk: Similar to freelancer.com with some little differences in how freelancers are recruited. Basically it's still a freelancer site. I think O'Desk is better if you need writing tasks although you can find any type of freelancer in any area of expertise. Elance: Yet another online staffing site. Personally I have only used Elance once or twice.
Information overload: We have previously seen how information can be both a lifesaver and a deterrent to action at the same time. In simple terms, too much information is an obstacle to simple living. At work or in business, it's no different. Actually in some cases it can be more stressful since we are bombarded with information and pressed to take action in a short time. Information can come from different channels at different angles - emails, calls, colleagues, data and figures, schedules, price changes, customer complaints and a thousand others. Whatever your job or business is there are times were we are handling too much information at the same time. We obviously need to simplify. We need special filters to put the volume down on some information inputs and amplify other inputs which are more essential to help us solve some problem or get us closer to our goals with more ease and less hassle. One way of handling information overloads, and one which I find most effective, is by blocking time for certain tasks according to priority. That means that if I am working on finishing off a particularly important part of a project - for instance preparing
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this chapter - I block all other information inputs for a stipulated time (say 1 hour) or until the task is complete. I turn off my phones, disconnect from the Internet (or turn off IM application, social media, etc) and I make sure I am not interrupted in anyway by anyone or anything. It's the same thing at work. I list down what are the most important tasks (MITs) of the day every morning or the previous day. Sometimes it's one really major task but sometimes it can be two or three. I try to block the necessary time for those tasks and exclude everything else such as block phone calls, close off the email client and switch off my mobile. Now I know that there are circumstances where this is not possible. This is understandable but I will always try to 'force' this method as it always pays off in the long run. Yes sometimes urgent emails and calls get unanswered for half an hour or an hour but that is fine because you have identified clearly what your most important tasks are and your most important tasks are the ones aligned to your work or business objectives. In that sense you are covered. Another good way of simplifying information is by using contextual to-do lists. It's basically like a normal to-do list where you list down tasks you need to do or information you need to use later but the tasks, notes and information are listed under a few simple categories - for example 'Work', 'a Project name’, 'Home', etc. Basically the contexts need to be as few and simple as possible and it is up to you to decide what they should be. So any new task, note or information can be categorised into one of these bucket groups and dealt with later or when its time is due. The importance of to-do lists or note taking is to take off information off your mind and into the list. The problem with information overload is in fact that your mind would still be subconsciuosly processing information hence diluting your focus.
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The Art of Simple Living As for contextual to-do lists, I use an app called Todoist. It is available in a number of platforms such as iOS, OSX, Android and browsers such as Chrome and Firefox. You setup one account and it syncs to wherever you are using it. Todoist allows you to build your colour coded categories and label them so you can add tasks to them. You can also schedule a reminder at a particular day or time.
Emails: Emails have completely changed the business world and the way we communicate. At the same time email is a double-edged sword. They have revolutionized communication but are very disruptive to our daily workflow and business. Sometimes they come in torrents and we spend most of our time answering them. Some jobs like customer support for instance struggle hard to get close to the bottom of their inbox and as soon as they get there it's already full again! Here are a few practical tips to keep your email management simple and your inbox clean: Do not check your email first thing in the day: I used to do that for a long time. The problem with it is that without you knowing it will suck you in and waste a good hour or two of your day. Remember the MITs? Always start from the most important tasks of the day first and focus on those. Do not be an email hawk: Stop checking your email. There is a very common habit of constantly checking for new emails even when working on something or using a different application. Also, if you have email notifications popping up on your desktop or mobile screen - turn them off. I am always fascinated when I come across managers who have this notification setup and wonder how it doesn't frustrate them having this thing pop up like 5 times or more in a minute!!
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Take action on an email straight away: When you open an email and read it, decide straight away what to do with it. So basically if you can respond to the email straight away just do it. If the email is quite long and you need to read it later, tag it 'read later' and archive. If it's junk or can dispose of it, trash it immediately. If the email requires action, you can take note of it on a to-do list (hint: Todoist) then archive it where you can easily retrieve it later. If you need to await for a response you can create a 'wait folder' and keep it there until concluded then archive.
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11 Simplicity in Love
“Living simply makes loving simple” Bell Hooks
elationships are the most significant elements of our lives because they can be our strongest asset but they can also be a source of complexity and stress which needs to be simplified. Since relationships are really the biggest influence in our life, they should take priority over other areas. Don’t forget that our relationships can build a foundation for other things to rest upon. When our relationship with our loved ones or friends is a strong and healthy one it forms a solid base which supports all our other pursuits in life. Likewise when relationships are simple and easy going, our life becomes more simple and easygoing.
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The status of our relationship is very much reflected in all the other things that we do and vice versa - learning to live more simply opens up new spaces wherein our relationships can flourish and accommodate themselves better. Living simply makes loving simple says Bell Hooks. I like this quote because it pretty much sums up this concept in one simple and neat sentence. When we start living with simplicity, we start
shedding away a lot of the inessential distractions and pursuits which are unfaithful to our real life purpose. We become more focused, serene and in line with our nature. This is where our heart becomes more balanced. We might not notice it at first, but rest assured that the others around you will. You will give off a different vibe and you respond to situations and people in a more balanced way. This is because within the course of our lives, our mind is very often in conflict with our heart. This is such a common human problem. Remember when I mentioned how we are influenced and made to believe that our wants are our needs in chapter 2? We are made to believe something that is not our true calling but a template laid out by somebody else. Hence our heart becomes a bit confused and in conflict with what our mind is conditioned to think is right or wrong. But the heart always knows the right answer even though it is silent most of the time. This conflict creates noise and lack of clarity that is reflected in our relationships and life in general. Moreover, human relationships can be very fragile and complicated in themselves but Simplicity can be a real guide to their improvement. Here is a list of the root causes affecting relationship problems - whether it's a romantic, family or friendship relationship. These roots causes are all aspects of a more general problem mentioned before - the lack of a simple syntony between our heart and mind.
Expectations: This is perhaps a major cause of friction in relationships which is underestimated or not very often addressed. We all have expectations about other people and the world around us. It's like a model in our head of how people and things should behave. We sometimes get upset when these expectations are not met and people's behavior deviate from that mental model. Perhaps our
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The Art of Simple Living partner responds emotionally to our actions or words in a different way that we would like or is considered ideal to us. Or perhaps she or he has a completely different set of habits which makes living together in the same space somehow problematic. So we have expectations about how our spouse, partner or people close to us should behave but these expectations are not always met. This is why we sometimes feel there is something we dislike, disappointing us or makes us angry about people we have close ties with. We are mostly unaware of this. We don’t see that it is coming from an unmet expectation ingrained in our heads all we feel is basically the emotion that comes up when those expectations are broken. Let’s face it, in a middle of an argument people don’t usually say “Oh sorry honey your actions or words should not be taken to heart. I know it’s actually ME who cannot see past my expectations of you. Your actions are not upsetting in anyway. It’s just my expectations of them that is causing me to get upset!” A lot of couples who have been happily married or in a partnership for a good number of years will often tell you that the secret to their happy relationship was to accept the other person as he or she is. I'm sure you've heard it many times. Acceptance is an act of simplicity really because it does not go through that conflict between mind and heart. Acceptance comes straight from the heart. It bypasses that model in our mind of how people should behave so to speak. Of course acceptance does not come so easily or in a straightforward way. It comes from adopting a general attitude of openness which as we saw is born out of letting go of some of our beliefs - an important key to simple living. It is also set in motion and very much helped by starting to simplify other areas of your life because practicing the art of simplicity slowly transforms you to a new version of yourself that is lighter and more aligned to
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life's purpose, hence balanced.
Putting the blame on others: Blaming others for something that has upset us or broken our heart is mostly a natural consequence to the previous problem expectations. When our expectations are not met we attribute our hurt or frustration towards the action of the other person. We externalize our inner hurt and direct it towards what we belief is the cause of it - the other person. But blaming others is not just a matter of unmet expectations. As fallible humans we can blame others for all sorts of things that we go through - guilt, shame, failure, disappointment, anger, frustration and others. Blaming our partners or people we are in a close relationship with can be something that rocks and bruises that relationship sometimes for a long time. But why do we blame others? Is it because others are the TRUE cause of our problems or feelings? OK now I’m sure that there are several occasions where the self-centered, egoistic or childish behavior of others can be the thing which sets off a chain of events and tension. And we would be partly right in finding the cause of the problem in that behavior. But truly and honestly this will not solve anything and it is only part of the truth anyway. The truth is that we are very subjective creatures who can behave erratically sometimes and since we are connected to others, there will always be mutual effect between our behavior and that of others. As they say, it takes two to Tango. This is the thing, it is really really hard for someone to see things really objectively when her or his feelings are hurt. In an argument, for instance, we very rarely can see ourselves reacting or realize how inappropriate our words or actions are. All we can see are the actions of the other. Relationships are always in a feedback loop. It never flows one way. So it is also very true that what we see as inappropriate behaviour of others close to us,
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The Art of Simple Living could also be a reflection and a reaction to our own behaviour which we cannot see. The others are mirrors to ourselves. You cannot measure, assess or blame the actions of others by leaving yourself out of the equation. You are part of that equation. A secret to simplicity in relationships is keeping this analogy of feedback loops in mind at all times. We must come to understand and pay close attention to the fact that the way others are behaving is partly a reaction to our own behaviour. This can be seen most clearly when we go into an argument with others. The other person is upset and says something hurtful to us or criticises us in a way that makes us feel bare. We respond unknowingly with equal or greater impunity and this reinforces the other person’s argument or criticism towards us. This keeps on going in what is called a positive feedback loop where two parties of a relationship give feedback to each other and every feedback loop gets amplified more and more. What we need is negative feedback or attenuation although the title is misleading and counter-intuitive because we think of negative as in negative emotions but it's only referring to the feedback loop. This is when one of the individuals in an argument or disagreement, understands and is aware of this situation and instead of reacting to the other person’s language or behaviour, chooses to stop and not react. After a while the other person will also change his or her behaviour by slowing down, lightening up or just change the mood or energy of the situation. There again one behaviour starts affecting and mirroring the other. This can be both in a positive or negative way. Masters in the art of simple living know very well how to simplify and lighten up relationships through a strong grasp of how people react and respond to each other and by being aware that we are always a central part of this dynamic.
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Misguided truths & misinterpretations: As we saw with the problem of expectations and blaming others, there is a common theme that revolves around having a skewed perspective of the truth. In the case of putting the blame on others, we have a misguided version of the true picture - because we are not seeing how we would be affecting the other person to behave the way she or he does. So partiality or subjectivity will in a way imply that we do not see the whole picture or the whole truth at any one time. With lack of a more complete picture we tend to misinterpret the facts. In the case of relationships, by facts I mean what we see as factual from our point of view such as the other’s words, behaviour and many times how we feel about it. From these partial facts we interpret a situation and come to a conclusion based on those facts. However an interpretation based on partial facts and or a subjective bias of those facts tend to be more of a misinterpretation rather than an interpretation. We have got to watch out not to misinterpret the actions of other because this will lead to problems and tension. We have to stay away from judging or interpreting the other person’s actions too quickly. We need to hesitate before striking a judgement or coming to any conclusion of some sort. Keep in mind that what we think is a true picture of the situation is not a true picture at all. We are only seeing it from a partial and subjective angle. Keep this in mind at all times and things will tend to get simpler - much simpler. Misinterpretations are things to avoid in relationships or in any other area of life for that matter. It’s always wiser to drop the urge to judge another person’s actions based on our interpretation of the moment. Keep judgements at bay and things will get better, richer and simpler.
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The Art of Simple Living Not listening to our heart: We do listen to our heads more often that we listen to our hearts. Sometimes we can even say that we live in our heads, as an expression to mean that we are a little bit consumed by our own thinking and worldview. Do we ever live in our hearts? I’ve never heard of that as an expression only because perhaps it doesn’t happen that often. I mentioned how in the broadest sense, our difficulties in relationships come from having a disparity between heart and mind. Our thinking can overpower or overshadow the messages coming from our heart. When I say the heart, it doesn’t mean the physical heart of course. It’s a metaphor for an inner space of deeper understanding and wisdom that is beyond our thinking and conceptualisation. Listening to our heart, or that deeper calmer inner space where things are clearer, is synonymous with the art of simple living. We covered this with the concept of intuition versus thinking in chapter 3. Intuition comes from that inner clear space we call heart. Thinking on the other hand is a series of never ending replays of past or fictitious events, discerning and evaluation and pattern abstractions. When it comes to relationships more than anything else, over-thinking prohibits simplicity and positive change. Try to maintain a relationship with your head instead of with your heart and its bound for disaster. You need to listen to your heart, especially when things get a bit rough and difficult. The heart can be a guide when our mind is lost and has no apparent clue to a solution. Getting into the habit of listening to our heart is also a good exercise in softening our hard outer shell, be more positively responsive to the other person and last but not least, be more sensitive and open to listen to our inner self. Not surprisingly it is also true that the more we learn to listen to our heart, the more we learn to be emphatic to what others are feeling even if they do
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not explicitly say it or show it. In a way you can say that you are starting to pick up signals outside the loud chatter in your head. Listening to our heart makes our relationship a hundredfold simpler because we avoid going through unnecessary friction, misunderstanding and painful clashes. It means communicating at a different bandwidth where we bypass expectations, judgments and misinterpretations. We do not let our mind dictate how the other should behave to be in line with our expectations. Listening to the heart goes beyond that. It tells us directly what we really need and if we follow that inner conviction, things get so much more simple.
Let me recapitulate the main points of this chapter and look at them from a bird’s eye point of view:
The conflict between our heart and mind is a major stumbling block to simplicity especially in relationships The conflict is reflected in our relationships and gives rise to three root problems: False expectations, Blaming, misinterpreting & being disconnected with our heart When we expect less and accept others for what they are, our relationships become stronger and simpler Keep in mind that other’s actions are partly a reflection of and a reaction to your own actions - The concept of relationships as feedbacks
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The Art of Simple Living Blaming others will not solve anything. When we trace back the other’s ‘fault’ back to us we become more impartial and balanced. You need to drop the urge to quickly judge, criticise or blame others. Our judgments are mostly based on partial and biased views. Keep judgments at bay and your relationship will get simpler, more positive and lighter Get in the habit of listening to your heart - that inner space of deeper understanding and wisdom which goes beyond thinking. A relationship should be lived through the heart and not through the head. Listen more to your heart and analyse situations less with your head.
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Simple Parenting
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“Your children need your presence more than your presents” Jesse Jackson
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he pinnacle of our daily rush and hectic lifestyles revolves around parenting. Not because parenting is negative or stressful in itself but because we push ourselves very hard to give the best to our children. We spread ourselves thin between cleaning up messy play areas, dropping them off to dance lessons and other activities, helping them with studies or homework and a list of another hundred chores. Parenting calls for simplicity in two major ways: 1) We need to simplify our approach to parenting and 2) we also need to create an environment to teach our children to live with simplicity
The Art of Simple Living
Simplifying parenting Here is a list of important things to do or avoid in order to simplify and make parenting a less resource intensive apsect of our life:
Teach them to solve problems: The value of learning and education is not about learning how to read and write or about learning a subject matter like maths or biology. The real value is about teaching children how to think and creatively solve problems on their own. And this is where education has failed miserably. We have a schooling system (and this applies worldwide) where it teaches children to learn things by rote instead of giving them the tools to explore and solve problems themselves. Teaching children to solve problems is a good investment in two ways. It makes them more independent and hence less reliable on your help while at the same time your are giving them lifelong tools which will make their life so much better and simpler. How do we teach our children to solve problems? The answer is by refraining from giving them readymade solutions on how to do this and that. Give them space to try things themselves and allow them to fail. The human brain is an extraordinary adaptive system. In the absence of ready-made answers it will be driven to find the answers by itself.
Avoid hyper-parenting: As parents we are anxious to impart the best knowledge and values to our children. We want to squeeze the best out of us and give it to them. Unconsciously this can drive us into hyperparenting where we overdo things and this has counterproductive effects. As a start, hyper-parenting drains and consumes us. It makes things more complex rather than simpler for us. As for the children, hyper-parenting restricts the space for
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freedom where they can expand and create by themselves - most of the time by trial and error. It can also make them reliable on you and therefore less able to tackle situation independently. It also undermines the development of personal confidence and the right self-image.
Teach them to be self-sufficient: This is more or less a direct product of the former two points. Allowing children to be independent by teaching them how to solve problems themselves while avoiding hyper-parenting is clearly a way to teach them to be self-sufficient. When a child encounters a problem or a relatively difficult situation, be there in the background for moral and emotional support but tell her that she WILL find the solution herself. Give them the space and if they fail or they need correction, that’s perfectly fine because obviously they will. Doing this time after time will help the child develop the ability to be self-sufficient. Even from a toddler or pre-schooler age and in situations that are relatively trivial, such as opening a box lid or putting on a shoe, there are ample occasions that can be lesson opportunities for self-sufficiency.
Let older siblings help the younger ones: This is a favourite one with parents who have more than one child. I cannot talk from direct experience about this one since I only have one child but a have a lot of friends and family who have two or three children and they often tell me what a simplification to parenting having older siblings is. Quite naturally, older brothers or sisters will take this role without much instruction but it’s always great to let them know how appreciated and helpful their contribution to the family is. Older brothers and sisters can cover some of the tasks and free up some time for you. Things like helping their younger siblings to dress up, brush teeth, watch over, carry stuff and so on.
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The Art of Simple Living Do not over-schedule: We send our children to gymnastics, soccer, drama, choir and a thousand other extra-curricular activities everyday. Once again, it’s a question of overdoing or hyper parenting. Should we send our children to every extra-curricular activity that they dream of or that we think is fit for them? Do we really have to give in to the social pressure of do, do and do some more? While physical activity is important for your child, is it necessary that your nineyear-old boy goes to soccer, karate and rugby at the same time? Well the answer is certainly not. Fun outdoor games with the family on a Sunday afternoon can be so much more rewarding. Warning: you have to be inventive to win the attention over from handheld video games, youtube and other media.
Create routines: Create simple daily routines that can systemise and simplify parenting. Giving your child the habit of a routine can moderate time and effort on your part needed to direct the child to certain tasks. Routines need not be overdone though. Too much routine will bring dullness and leave little free space where the child can expand her play and creativity. Freedom would be taken at the expense of structure. On the other hand, a little bit of structure is needed to simplify some tasks. A very good system that always works wonders for preschoolers and early grades alike is the reward chart. Basically a chart is drawn (let the child to the drawing!) every week with the day of week as columns and the routine tasks as rows. The tasks could be anything but preferably let these be tasks that need to be performed everyday such as cleaning up toys, bathing, washing teeth, etc. A sticker star or a very good sign will be placed in each box if the task is accomplished successfully. At the end of the week a small reward will be given if a certain number of tasks, or all tasks have been
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accomplished successfully.
Teaching our children to Live with Simplicity We are parenting our children in a fast-paced, information overloaded society. Therefore, in parenting, as in all other areas in life, we are basically facing the same problem with complexity: Children have too much stuff, too much information, too many distractions, too many choices, too many inessentials. Back to our mantra again: Simple living is about discarding the inessentials and focus on what is essential to your life purpose. The same thing applies, if not with more relevance, to parenting! Parenting is a vast subject to handle in one chapter. The essence of putting simplicity into parenting is applicable to children of all ages - from toddlers to adolescents. However for the sake of simplicity, I will be giving some focus on preschoolers and early grade years since these are the most important formative years. Our job is to guide our children in the right environment to learn what is meaningful and essential to their personal growth while giving them the space and the tools to solve the same issues with today's complex society. In short, it's giving the lessons on how to live with simplicity. But how do we do this? We must begin by simplyfing; we must get back to basics. Cut out the extraneous, keep it simple.
Here are some important areas to start from:
Purging Toys:
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The Art of Simple Living Toys should be tools and instruments of the imagination and not there to vanquish boredom. Toys can be really valuable to our child's upbringing if they are of the right type and in the right amount. Often children have too many toys strewn around in every quarter of the house. They quickly get bored with them and just as they do, they already have their eyes on the next new thing. Toys become just quick boredom quenchers. When children get quickly bored with toys it means that those toys stopped inviting their imagination to flow. Like most other physical objects, they become clutter that accumulates. So an important way to bring simplicity into this is to purge toys according to two criteria: Quantity and quality. First of all, children do not need toys every week and they do not need them in the hundreds. It was always a firm understanding between my daughter and us as parents to keep it down within a certain limit and if she grows out of some toys, then she has the autonomy and the responsability to decide to give it away. Secondly, and more importantly, toys need to be theme neutral and stimulate the imagination. What do I mean with theme neutral? For example toys that are branded after a certain kid’s movie or after a certain popular game have a certain fixed role. I'm sure you know which ones I am talking about. Children are in a way limited by the expectation of that role because they have seen the movie, read the story or played that game before. That toy is locked inside a theme. Theme neutral toys are more 'elastic' because their role and function can be stretched by the imagination of the child. My daughter loves to improvise a story (and involve me in it!) using bits and pieces of theme neutral toys as props for her 'stage'. One day something can be a magic cape for a heroine, the next it could be a table cloth for an afternoon tea party between best buddies. The same element is transformed by the imagination. There are a
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lot of things that are theme-neutral toys or which can be tools for the imagination when choosing toys for your children.
Touch & Experience Based Play: With modernization and technological advancement, child play has also become more and more disconnected from the earth and nature. I remember when I was a boy in the 70s, me and my neighbourhood friends used to go out and play in the fields nearby. We use to spend long summer days in the open air, playing scouts, making natural shelter with branches and leaves, collecting tadpoles and watch them grow, run after butterflies and all sorts of outdoor games you can imagine. We used to get soiled and dirty, climbing, falling, rolling and sliding. We had no video games and TV was as child-friendly as a minefield. Fun was left to our imagination and the bare outdoors. Nowadays, I see so many children from a really early stage stuck in front of screens of all formats - tablets, mobile, handheld video games and the TV screen. Sometimes it's sad to see a family gathering with all the family members stuck to their screens. Now let me be completely honest with you - I am not a technophobe who is against technology, online media and virtual stuff. I do know that there is a lot of learning to be had from TV, Youtube videos, educational games and apps in the right amount. Children need this kind of input as it also helps stimulate their imagination and increases their general knowledge. What is clearly unhelpful is the alienation and disconnection that comes from long hours in front of a screen and immersed in a world that is totally virtual. Children need to develop and learn by experiencing stuff with their senses and by interacting and tinkering with objects around them. The more they do that, the more they are reinforcing their cognitive abilities, imagination, problem-solving skills and the ability to respond naturally to the
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The Art of Simple Living world around them. They become more emotionally adept to life's circumstances. What are touch-based games? There are an infinite number of things you can get your children involved in. My all time favorite sensory-based play I do with my daughter is: Sowing seeds and growing plants (with personal names she gives them!), making stuff with air-drying clay, painting, going for walks and finding 'treasures' such as rock crystals, craft work, creating scents from flowers and tree bark, playing on the sand at the beach. These are a few examples from the many.
Avoiding Quick Fixes: When our life is stressed and complex we tend to cascade it down to other areas of our life and parenting is one of them. If our children are bored, grumpy and nagging but we have way too many things on our mind, we are tempted to go for quick fixes and shortcuts. A good example of a quick fix is giving our child a tablet to watch a video or play a game. Perhaps buying any toy as a way to temporarily appease a tantrum. We need to avoid these quick fixes. Boredom can be turned into excitment and an opportunity for cultivating more imagination. When my daughter complains "but i'm so bored!", I just give her a few suggestions of something she can create and come up with and one of them might spark the right idea to set her creating a game or some sort of entertainment. One idea, which always works for us, is that I tell her to come up with a story through enacting some of her toys and I record a two-minute short video. She loves being the screenwriter and director of her own play!
Encourage story telling:
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The last point takes me to another important concept - story telling. Since time immemorial story telling has been the vehicle for both cultivating the imagination of the storyteller and capturing the imagination of the audience. Story telling is also a very powerful communication tool. As adults we can be highly intelligent individuals and knowledgeable about our subject matter, but it will always be those who are storytellers who will get listened to, appreciated and admired. Story telling is an essential skill to learn. Children already have this natural ability but we need to encourage it and allow it to grow. Story telling can also be both something we can do for our children (children love stories) and a part of their creative play. Let them come up with a sort of story plot - doesn't matter if it's absurd (it might be absurd for you!). They can draw a sketch of the plot and then let them tell the story. It can also be good to record on video and playback. This gives feedback and reinforces the excitment!
Create distraction-free areas: Children are constantly looking for play and everything can be a source of play for them. This is perfect and as should be. It only becomes a problem during homework and study time since every little noise, picture or movement can be a source of distraction. Their 'monkey mind' would be constantly trying to pick up signals and interpreting them as sources of play. I personally do not agree with coercing children to work when all they want is play but things can be simplified and made easier if there are fewer distractions around. Creating distraction-free areas is not only helpful for study but also for creativity time or when doing crafts.
Highlight the importance of being passionate:
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The Art of Simple Living Now this is something schools definitely do not teach you. The single most important advice you can give someone is to follow his or her passion since this will definitely be in line with his or her life purpose. This is also an essential theme in living the art of simple living. Children are passionate about what they do. I see my daughter when she focuses all her energies in her play. She is totally in the flow. Let them know how important this is to achieve whatever they want in life. Passion is something always available on the tap when we are young but it is forgotten or grinded down when we grow older. Let them be conscious of how that energy can be used to pierce through any adversity life can throw at them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gilbert Ross is a writer, Philosopher, free-thinker, life coach and teacher. Gilbert has been writing about personal growth topics for a number of years on his blog Soul Hiker and on various other media. He is passsionate about researching, writing, practising and teaching people how to achieve positive life transformations and unleash the limitless potential of their mind. Gilbert has studied Philosophy at the University of London and University of Malta. He is husband to a supportive wife and father to a beautiful daughter. Gilbert is also passionate about cooking, traveling, learning and exploring new life skills and listening to music. You can follow Gilbert on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Gross39 Google+: https://www.google.com/+GilbertRoss Twitter: https://twitter.com/GilbertRoss9
