A Newish Direction Down the Trail

Starting down a path toward minimalism is not quite where I imagined I'd wind up as a result of the practice of walking. Everything that Remains continues to challenge me in ways that I knew that it would and ways that I had not imagined. Today was the second day of a renewed attempt at the 30 Day Minimalist Game. The idea of the game is that for 30 days you get rid of items from the house.  Day 1 you get rid of one item, day 2 is two items, day 3 is three items, all the way up to day 30 with thirty items. If I make it the full thirty days, I will have gotten rid of 465 items total. Yesterday, I started with the book at the airport. Today, I identified two other books by me beloved author Malcolm Gladwell.

Like the Dandelion Reaching Skyward from the
Crack in the Asphalt - We Persist

Three down...four hundred and sixty two to go. The last time I attempted this game, I got to about day eight or nine by divesting myself of books. At that point, I knew what I had to do, so I skipped the process and cleared out my bookshelf keeping only the very most "essential" books. Since I lept ahead, I rationalized that I could take a break and resume the process a few days down the road. I never picked up again. The books that I'm letting go now made the cut of "essential" books last time.

There is a lesson or two here for me. First, the process is the process because the daily discipline of deciding to lighten my load is the really valuable part of the game.  By leaping ahead, I burned out too quickly and let myself off the hook too easily. That's alright. Life is about progress, not perfection, and this time I will follow the suggested path as it has been laid out by folks who have ultimately found a measure of success in the practice of minimalism. I'm drawn to the idea of minimalism because I want what I perceive these people have "achieved." I should probably be willing to take their suggestions (without shortcuts) on how to get it.

Second, one of the reasons that the Gladwell books were saved the last time is because I allowed the material possession of the books themselves to become part of my identity. I was not successful then, and over the last two days, I've found it difficult to part with things that I've come to use (in part) to identify myself. It is both uncomfortable to let go of the things and the part of my identity that I perceive they represent, and it's difficult to realize the trap that I've fallen into where I've allowed the things to be substituted for a truer realization of my personality or essence. The ego is an amazing thing because though other aspects of my practice, I can identify the fingerprints of my ego in this level of discomfort.

I don't know what's going to happen this time with the experiment, but I do know I'm better prepared to carry it out than I was several months ago. I'm grateful for my sister's foresight in giving me a book that so clearly pointed in a direction that I believe I need to take. Tomorrow will be, and I have faith it will be good.

Confronting Change

The truth of the matter is that no matter how hard we might try, avoiding change is impossible. The seemingly never ending stream of unique sunrises and sunsets, often of the same general geographic area, that I bombard my audience of almost no readers with every day should act as a testament to the fact that every month we endure, every week we put in the record books, every day that we face, and every moment that we live is a unique creative event.

Sunrise - Daphne, AL

Our brains seem to be wired to gloss over these vast differences and constant churn of ever changing events by finding patterns that give us comfort in the illusion of habit and stability, but the fact of the matter is that sense of stability is a fiction of our own making.

I got a book for Christmas last year titled Everything that Remains by Joshua Fields Millburn (with interruptions by Ryan Nicodemus) that I've been putting off reading since the moment I unwrapped it. The subtitles is "A Memoir by The Minimalists," and I put off reading the book because I was fairly certain that the story that they lay out regarding the value of minimalism would hit too close to home for comfort.

I was not wrong in that assumption.

Even though change is constant, and its definitively observable in the spectacular differences that I seem to be less and less able to dismiss at a whim, deliberate change is more difficult for me. The challenge for me is to heed the call that I've been building toward for more than a year now. My walking has been part of that path toward a less consumer driven existence. I first started the practice because I could not get the thought of how good it would be to slow down a little and live in each moment a little more out of my head.

The walking was a mechanism to address a sense of grown unsettledness in my life. Walking was the mechanism by which I literally took the first steps that have led me to this point.

Clouds - The Manifestation of Change - Mobile, AL

It is a point where my discomfort with maintaining the status quo has been balanced with my discomfort in pursuing a more deliberate path. The scaling back of materialism is something that I know in the very pit of my stomach that I'm going to have to try. At the same time, it was painfully difficult to leave the hardcover of David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell laying on a chair in the passenger terminal at BWI Airport after I finished reading it on my flight in to Charlotte, NC today. I wanted to save the book because it had impacted the way I viewed the world, but I know that I was unlikely to ever read it again.

The desire to keep a piece of that experience near me by keeping the book led me to carry it another 800 miles from where I'd finished receiving the benefit of reading the words.

If you want a copy of the book, I left it laying on a chair in the airport where it might change the way someone else views the world. I did what I knew was right but still felt like a difficult thing to complete. It felt good walking away from the book. Much better than walking up to the chair to set it down.

With the release of the book, I took another step on a journey where the path seems to be finding me. It's a different experience, and I look forward to seeing what road rises up to meet me tomorrow.