Simple Gifts

What can I do to simplify my life?

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer. On one hand, I feel like I’m always trying to simplify, but that other people are making it complicated.

On the other hand, I feel like simplicity is not a big goal for me right now. When I moved to CA this summer, I spent a lot of time decluttering for the move. I’ve blogged about this. I got tired of it. Simplicity had taken on a complicated life of its own.

While I was in the midst of it, I found this hilarious article from The Toast: How to Get Rid of Clutter and Live Abundantly

• Thank every item in your refrigerator deeply – kiss each one of them softly and slowly with your mouth – then prepare for each item a small Viking funeral. Set them adrift on a blazing ship into the waters of a very cold lake. In the future, when you are hungry, eat your memories. The only thing that belongs in your refrigerator is mindfulness.

The interior of a clean white refrigerator showing a solitary green apple

Yeah. That’s how I’m going to simplify my life 😉

Perhaps the one thing that would help me simplify my life right now, is to “declutter” anxiety. A number of my complicating behaviors are either unhelpful responses to anxiety that’s already there, or meant to ward off anticipated anxiety that might be coming. I gave up anxiety for Lent last year, with mixed success.

There’s the usual stuff: facebook less, sleep more, exercise more (and these are all intertwined).

There’s also, “write more.” I’m doing NaNoWriMo, and I’m behind in word count, but that fact doesn’t bother me. I can catch up. The first year I won, I wrote the last 5,000 words on the last day. Last year I wrote 25K in the last week.

No. What’s been making me anxious and complicated are the emotions that writing this story is uncovering. I wrote the original version many years ago. It, and I, have changed a lot since then. I always knew I wanted to make it into a novel. People encouraged me to. Yet, it became this big anxiety-provoking thing, I became paralyzed, and it sat in a drawer.

I still catch myself thinking, as I’m writing, “someday I will be different. Someday I will be able to do this, to write a good novel about this material.”

In fact, and simply, someday is now.