Less is More

Over on Cooking My Life, Maureen chose a word for 2009. Hers is Relax. She's got a nice story about how she came to choose that word. It's been giving me food for thought. (Her blog often does that!)

A day or two after Christmas, my sweet husband and I had a conversation about what our lives might look like a few years down the road, once our youngest daughter is off to college. It will be the first time in our lives together when we'll have the opportunity to be a couple, just the two of us, no kids in tow. I'm looking forward to that.

But to get from here to there, especially if we hope to move or travel, we are going to need to do some serious downsizing. As we talked about it, the big picture seemed somewhat daunting.

Then I applied the Flylady principle to this quest.
Baby steps.

So how do you baby step your way to dramatic downsizing in three years?
Do a little bit every day.

From there, we came to our word for 2009:

Simplify

We started right away.

For Dale, it was as easy as unsubscribing from one of the two newspapers we receive daily.

For me? I started by tossing out old e-mails and unsubscribing from e-newsletters that I never get around to reading.

We've done simple stuff like that each day for the last week.

Dale took some books off his office shelves and returned them to our family library. They weren't a top priority any more.

I got rid of some baked goods ingredients that were far past their prime. After all, I don't make brownies from scratch any more ... I buy a box of mix. Who needs the baking chocolate and evaporated milk?

So today, Dale and I are taking time to pare down our books by actually reading instead of just buying them. I plucked Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck off the shelf where it's been waiting its turn for years.

I've only read the Author's Note, Acknowledgements and Introduction so far. (I can't help it. I got into the habit as an English major in college where my emphasis was in publishing. There's good info in those oft-overlooked passages!) I expect I may be writing more here about concepts I read in this book.

So I began Chapter One ... and found the above quotation.

Golly! That fits!

For a chronic list-maker and To-Do-er, and as a lifetime learner, action seems like a requirement of life! But as one seeking to simplify, "each day something is dropped."

It will likely be a long, long time before I learn to "arrive at non-action."

That thought led me to another quotation, this by Abraham Lincoln:

Better to be silent and thought a fool,
then to speak and remove all doubt.

That was a difficult lesson for me to learn. It was mandatory about a decade ago when I was in a Catch-22 situation. Anything I said was going to be misconstrued by one or another member of my family. I had to learn to remain silent, do my job, and let my actions speak to my integrity.

This learning to simplify may be like that.

Less is More.