The next step on the road back to Self is to put your external life in order. Keeping it current and simply is a good place to start.
If we don’t make the time to work on creating the life we want, we’re eventually going to have to spend a LOT of time dealing with a life we don’t want – Anonymous
Keep it current
Our physical surroundings should reflect where we are now. We don’t want to continually be reminded of a past we have outgrown. In other words, we need to regularly take out the trash – which is that which no longer serves us. If we don’t, these reminders will hold our progress back like a magnet pulling us in the wrong direction. Anything that’s not an accurate reflection of who we are anymore, will have to go, since it no longer ’re-presents’ us. If every time we use Aunt Mary’s saucepan, we’re being reminded of how lonely we felt as a child, we need to pass it on to someone else – without the back story attached.
My life seems to be a series of new beginnings and I regularly clear the decks as a result. I de-clutter my belongings and re-invent my living space. I find it frees me up to grab opportunities coming my way and to flow unencumbered with the changes.
The past and future only exist in our minds. Real life, on the other hand, happens in real time – in the Now. I try to stay focussed on what counts – that which is in front of me. I also try to stay current with the people in my life. I focus on enjoying who they are now, instead of enacting with them what used to be.
Sometimes, we have to let go of the comfortable known, but no longer helpful. As we grow, that which no longer serves us, the dissonant old, becomes apparent and starts falling away to make space for the resonant new.
I pressed the delete button on my entire music collection a few years back because each song took me back in time – mostly to emotional spaces I did not want to be in. I now have a music library that reflects where I am at currently. It helps me focus, calms me when I need it or drowns out the neighbour’s party if necessary. Point is, it keeps me in present tense.
Clear away the debris of old thought patterns, bad habits and gummy thinking. It results in sloppy performance. The mind, Self’s operating system, needs regular upgrading and updating. Just like data accumulation and old operating system remnants slow down PC performance, so our stories, baggage and other accumulated stuff slow us down the older we get. Keep it current.
Knowledge is learning something new every day. Wisdom is letting go of a bad habit every day – Farshad Asi
Acquiring knowledge is good, as long as we do something with it. Accumulated knowledge unapplied goes bad, like rotten apples in our brain larder. Applying our knowledge grows us as people – we become different people. With knowledge unapplied, we stay the same – only with more luggage.
Keep it simple
We need to keep resisting and eliminating the unnecessary. Ask yourself: ‘Does this serve me, given where I want to go?’
American-Indian wisdom puts it this way. Warriors aim for simplicity, cutting out all unnecessary acts, thoughts and feelings. In this way, they save personal power and find it easier to keep in check those thoughts and feelings they do use.
I live simply to live fully. To me, there is elegance in simplicity, in its uncluttered purity. It creates space for living, freedom to flow. The lines are clean – there are no hooks to ensnare me.
Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it – Joshua Becker
Absence of clutter helps me settle my mind into the moment. Having less stuff also means less to worry about, less to steal, less to guard and – as a result – more freedom.
As a rule of thumb, I go for quality not quantity. If I put garbage in, I will get garbage out. This applies to material things, food, company, mental stimulation and entertainment. At one point, I stripped my food intake right down to the basics and then started introducing foods one at a time. I was acutely aware of how each made me feel and that guided my menu going forward.
Live simply so others may simply live – Mahatma Gandhi