The Essentials.

I found this passage recently and thought it was worth sharing:

Stop buying unnecessary things.
Toss half your stuff. Learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.
List four essential things in your life;
stop doing non-essential things.
Do these essentials first each day.
Clear distractions; focus on each moment.
Let go of attachment to doing, having more.
Fall in love with less.
- [via mnmlist]

This seems like a good and simply way to declutter both physical and mental spaces, so I filtered this mantra of sorts through my day-to-day life to gauge myself. For a post about minimalism, lots of words ahead :)

• Stop buying unnecessary things. I'm currently renting a room with family acquaintances for three months. My living quarters consist of a small-ish bedroom with a desk, twin-size daybed, closet and just enough floor space to exercise in. This setup prevents me from bringing much else into the room, so I've been reduced into only buying grocery items. I don't really need new clothes (I wear scrubs 40 hours a week), and the only thing(s) I'm planning over the next few weeks are travel- or school-related. Obviously, the fact that I don't get paid at my preceptorship helps out a lot with me not buying things.
  
  
• Toss half your stuff. This has virtually been done, with me being forced to live with much less. Over the past year I've donated tons of clothes, mostly shipping them back to needy people in the Philippines. I've also been in the process of digitizing my music collection -- a slow, painful but necessary process. My living, dining and bedroom furniture now lives at our condo in Columbia.
  
  
• Learn contentedness. Actually I'm pretty happy with having to live with less. It should be no surprise that I love sparsely-decorated areas.
  
  
• Reduce half again. Before I move back to the West Coast this autumn, I plan on pruning my possessions even more to make my transition as easy as possible.
  
  
• List four essential things in your life; stop doing non-essential things. Here's where I had to take a moment to think about what I really considered "essential.". Admittedly, I have more than those listed below, but here are four in no particular order:
  
  
  1. A calm qi. This is especially important for me as I've had great trouble with negative energy and impulse control in the past, resulting in regrettable damage to myself and the people around me.
     
     
  2. Music. No surprises here. I'm always on the hunt for great music, and it's become a massive part of how I self-identify.
     
     
  3. Physical health. I've always wanted to live a healthier lifestyle, and finally seriously took steps in achieving this with much more regular exercise and a restricted diet. I suppose getting work experience in a clinical health setting didn't hurt either.
     
     
  4. Positive relationships with others. Unfortunately it took me a LONG time to really understand this, but I've found that healthy, happy relationships with family and loved ones have just as much (if not more!) benefit for my personal well-being and growth than just having to rely on myself. I'm not saying I use my family and friends as crutches, but it's a great comfort to know that people really are there when I need them -- to either lift me up or kick my ass, whichever is appropriate.
  
  
• Do these essentials first each day. Clear distractions; focus on each moment. Interestingly enough, I say a little prayer on my way to work each day that covers most of these essentials. (I should probably do this when I first wake up to minimize the distraction.) I don't really think of myself as a "religious" person, but I believe I am getting more in touch with my spiritual, introspective side as I grow older.
  
  
• Let go of attachment to doing, having more. Fall in love with less. I cannot say that I don't wish for luxury items. Who am I kidding; I'd love to own stuff in high-end retail catalogs. But I know the line between simple possession and excessive consumption. As for "doing more," I am consciously trying to achieve this [discussed in this post], purely for the life experiences.

simple equals good

So I guess I'm doing okay so far. I suppose any lifestyle change is easy to implement. It's successfully maintaining that change that's difficult. But since I've already "fall[en] in love with less," I hope the rest falls into place sooner rather than later.

Focus.

Sometime last night I realized that this week was actually gonna be pretty busy. I looked at my calendar and saw that instead of two tests as I'd previously thought, I had four: two tomorrow and one each on Thursday and Friday. After the initial moment of predictable panic, I settled down and became grateful that the exams were at least somewhat spread out over the week, allowing me some respite in between them.

An excerpt from this article on Zen Habits touches on my reactions to a busy day/week:

You are in the middle of your day today, and you’re caught up in the sandstorm of thoughts, feelings, to-dos, meetings, readings, and communications of this day.

Pause. Breathe. Let all of that fade.

Now focus on doing one thing, right now. Just choose one thing, and clear away all other distractions. Seriously, clear it all away.

Admittedly this is not that easy to do if your entire week is filled with to-do lists for each day, but focusing on the task at hand is essential for me if I want to stay sane -- especially now that the semester is drawing to a close and so many things have to be wrapped up and attended to.

Zen rock garden

The trick is to let everything else go and focus on the doing of the current task, which in this case is cracking open my notes/textbooks and re-absorbing the material I've learned over the last couple of weeks in four different subjects. A bit more complex than it sounds; I often find myself thinking about Rad Bio when I have my CVIT notes spread out and vice versa. The distraction of being at home is also more than I can handle on many nights, hence my frequent trips to Memorial Union for a few hours of (attempted nightly) study.

I find that to-do lists do help a lot; I manage my tasks and events for the week/month on Rainlendar, a nice little calendar app that sits on top of my laptop wallpaper. I'm not the most organized person by nature, so having a constant reminder of what needs to be accomplished has been invaluable. It helps me focus on individual tasks, and I get great satisfaction when they disappear from the list.

Even with this time-management tool, the biggest challenge for me is really being able to focus on one thing at a time without letting my mind become distracted by other obligations. But no one ever said that achieving Zen would be easy, did they?

Ommmmmmmmmm. Wish me luck.

Sunday Zen.

While reading up on minimalism and Zen today, I stumbled across this passage from Thoughts Without A Thinker by Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over, or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

I realized that this a much more elegant (and eloquent) way of saying "Live each day as if it were your last."

My first reaction was that this is a backwards philosophy. How could you ever truly enjoy something if you knew that it was bound to fail or break, that your time with it was limited?  Wouldn't that knowledge make the resulting experience bittersweet?  How could you possibly achieve peace of mind if you went through life constantly expecting the end of things?  I couldn't see the benefit.

Though upon further contemplation, it makes a lot of sense to realign your thinking this way.  Nowhere does the passage tell you to adopt a pessimistic attitude about the natural impermanence of life and its experiences.  It doesn't say "Yes, it's beautiful, but it won't last anyway, so you might as well give up now" which is how one might initially interpret it, save for the last sentence.

When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.

The wisdom of this is striking.  I suppose this has to do more with acceptance of the facts that life isn't perfect.  I know that tragedy and hardships are inevitable, but I typically have a hard time coping when things don't go as planned in my personal life.  Inwardly, I tend to see most things (worldviews, relationships, attitudes) as ideal. Maybe if I tried to really understand that there is room for a little acceptance that things are going to change -- and sometimes for the worse, life's journey would be a less stressful and I'd stop bugging out as much.  I don't expect myself to not be disappointed every time -- I think I'm a generally optimistic person -- but if I "hope for the best, but expect the worst" I'd be more prepared to travel through life's valleys.

This is truly a rare moment of personal serendipity because two days ago I had a phone conversation with someone close to me who said essentially the same thing.  "Life is hard," she said, "and you'll always have stress over something.  Don't expect anything to be as easy anymore ... because we've grown up.  But it's how you deal with it and move forward that's important."

It's a difficult philosophy for me to adopt, but absolutely essential in the long run.  Happy Sunday.