And it sounds like too much information already, doesn’t it?
No worries, we speak metaphor here. But please appreciate how hard I had to fight my baser impulses on what to choose for the picture.
So here we are at the hilltop of early January, a traditional vantage point for looking backward and forward, where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Arbitrary? Sure. You can swivel a 180 any time.
But this week just feels … righter than any other. It snaps into the groove worn by millennia and the billions of souls who’ve gone before. It wasn’t arbitrary that the Romans named this month for Janus, their dual-faced god who simultaneously looked in opposite directions.
In my own 2010, progress was made. Things got done. Some stuff finished and other stuff begun.
But I have to admit to a certain amount of — again, apologies, but when the word fits — creative constipation. Projects and processes frequently took longer than it seemed they should’ve. More effort. More strain. More screaming at the tiles. And I’ll shut up before this particular line of comparison goes too far.
Suffice to say that here are some first-of-the-year measures that just feel right for getting deeper into the flow again.
Subtracting 155 Points Of Clutter
This one comes courtesy of Chris Guillebeau, whose book The Art Of Non-Conformity was a Christmas present that I read last week.
He mentions encountering a quest by someone to pare his life’s possessions down to 100 items. Despite some categorical fudging — like, all books counting as one item — Guillebeau decides he couldn’t do that. But that he could spend at least one month jettisoning 5 items a day.
I like this.
I don’t abide clutter when it looks like clutter, but I’m living proof it’s possible to be an organized packrat.
In this purge, there are no rules, no disqualifications. An item’s an item. That old parka and that short stack of outdated mutual fund reports are equal under the law. Donate it, recycle it, sell it, give it away, or just trash it.
Six days in and this has turned into something I actually look forward to … discovering what’s going to find its way to the chopping block.
It feels like clearing away deadfall and thorns to make room for new growth.
Or this: When Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, came out, the feature that was touted the most, for both of them, was their streamlining. This was the first time in maybe forever that operating systems were smaller, less bloated, than their predecessors.
Many of us operate in a similar fashion. Too much stuff — especially stuff we don’t use, don’t need, aren’t particularly attached to anymore — can start to weigh us down, choke us off. It turns into arterial placque that slows the circulation.
It isn’t just the end result of getting rid of it that helps. It’s also the act of getting rid of it. There’s a distinction. I like the way Danielle LaPorte puts it in this guest post away from her home turf:
Letting go makes way for something closer to your truth … which is always more beautiful. Always.
Making space signals the universe that you’re ready for ideal … or at the very least, much improved.
Making space expands your being and clarifies (and dare I say, actually minimizes) your needs.
I was already thinking of the process as making space even before encountering this.
Must be something in the January air.
The To-Stop-Doing List
I’ve seen this concept before, but last week ran across it 4 or 5 different times, independent of each other. I can take a hint.
The idea of a to-don’t list is, bet you guessed already, the opposite of a to-do list. Subtraction rather than addition. Taking away instead of piling on.
We all have entries that belongs on such a list: Counterproductive habits. Fibs we tell ourselves. Commitment anchors that weigh us down. Behaviors that don’t serve us well, aren’t mandatory, create no harm if eliminated, but which we still keep on life support.
Here are some of mine that are most relevant:
- Stop striving to be a perfectionist about every little thing. Because not everything merits that level of obsessive detail, and it takes away resources from the things that do.
- Stop spending so much time at the desk. Oh, it’s a great desk. It’s a battleship of a desk. But spending so much time in one place, for so many different reasons, has begun to put tar pit imagery in my head. Not good. Easy antidote: Bust out the MacBook a little more and roam to a different view.
- Stop ingesting dairy. Not permanently, necessarily. Just an experimental 3 weeks, to see if it makes any noticeable differences in the way I look or feel or operate. Then decide from there.
- Stop trying to read while lying on the couch. Silly — agreed. And I really do know better. But I keep doing this anyway. And it keeps putting me to sleep. “Tonight will be different,” I tell myself. Lies! Then I wake up in the deep of night and have a terrible time getting back to sleep for real, which doesn’t do the next day any favors. Is it really that hard to just sit the fuck up?
- Stop lying to myself that I’m going to do much meaningful writing late in the evening … especially, triple-dog especially, after Krav Maga training. It hardly ever happens. But apparently I retain this vestigial image of myself as a night person. I used to be. And still have no trouble pushing it into the wee hours. (Well, except for reading while prone.) But at some point I mutated into being far more creatively effective during the day. Which I really should use to the fullest instead of lying to myself about something that ain’t gonna happen.
- Stop trusting complete strangers at face value when they turn up in my In-Box. Last fall I let someone into my bubble who’s recently been outed as a serial plagiarist under many different aliases. It only amounted to giving an interview and occasional counsel on questions he had; a lot of other people weren’t so lucky. Still a waste of time, though, and not the kind of entity I want to remotely be associated with. I don’t wish to be paranoid, but still should’ve done a bit of due diligence.
- Stop making excuses and finish novel #11/book #15 already. No elaboration necessary.
Sometimes you get to make it. Sometimes you have to take it.
Either way, may 2011 yield all the space you need.
[Photo by kalyan02]
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