Great insights, Will River. There’s clearly something here about only focusing on the essential, letting everything else fade away. I wonder how we choose/decide what is essential? In your life cycling seemed to be essential in one context, but not in the next. Clothes perhaps never were. I’d love to hear about how we might go about determining what is essential at any point in our lives...
Thanks Andrew Ritchie! I appreciate the encouragement.
My guess is that the best way to do this is to periodically stop and listen, whether that be through journaling, conversation, or contemplation (or going overseas for a while 😉). And then when a candidate emerges, something that may no longer be essential, to entertain the thought of dropping it for a while (as Jason Fox talks about wonderfully in this video: https://www.foxwizard.com/labyrinths/?ref=foxwizard-newsletter). And then if after a period of time it is still a candidate, to run a safe-to-fail experiment to see if one's life is actually better without that thing.
Implied in this way of thinking is that to me it seems easier to stop doing things so that the things that remain become the focus, rather than picking up new things or choosing to elevate some things over others. I think this is aligned with the 'via negative' way of making decisions that Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains (see here: https://coffeeandjunk.com/via-negativa/).
This is what I did with cycling. It came up as a candidate when I changed the routine of my life and gave myself time to stop and think. I entertained the idea of dropping it for a while. The experiment I conducted was to stop riding. When I saw that my life was better without cycling, it was then I sold my bike. It was a series of progressive experiments.
What about you? How do you going about working that out?
Great insights, Will River. There’s clearly something here about only focusing on the essential, letting everything else fade away. I wonder how we choose/decide what is essential? In your life cycling seemed to be essential in one context, but not in the next. Clothes perhaps never were. I’d love to hear about how we might go about determining what is essential at any point in our lives...
Keep up the great writing.
Ok clothes are always essential I guess; my reference was more to “cool” clothes!
Haha...well, clothes were not essential at the beginning of my life, nor will they be at the end of my life I presume.
Thanks Andrew Ritchie! I appreciate the encouragement.
My guess is that the best way to do this is to periodically stop and listen, whether that be through journaling, conversation, or contemplation (or going overseas for a while 😉). And then when a candidate emerges, something that may no longer be essential, to entertain the thought of dropping it for a while (as Jason Fox talks about wonderfully in this video: https://www.foxwizard.com/labyrinths/?ref=foxwizard-newsletter). And then if after a period of time it is still a candidate, to run a safe-to-fail experiment to see if one's life is actually better without that thing.
Implied in this way of thinking is that to me it seems easier to stop doing things so that the things that remain become the focus, rather than picking up new things or choosing to elevate some things over others. I think this is aligned with the 'via negative' way of making decisions that Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains (see here: https://coffeeandjunk.com/via-negativa/).
This is what I did with cycling. It came up as a candidate when I changed the routine of my life and gave myself time to stop and think. I entertained the idea of dropping it for a while. The experiment I conducted was to stop riding. When I saw that my life was better without cycling, it was then I sold my bike. It was a series of progressive experiments.
What about you? How do you going about working that out?