Living in L.A., one confronts a world of acquisition. A quick glance at the neighbor or a fellow parent or a passerby reveals all that can be had and displayed.
We get tricked into believing that we constantly suffer from not enough. Not enough home, not enough status and wealth. Not enough influence, power and control. Not enough opportunity, for ourselves and our offspring. Not enough gorgeous friends and trendy vacations. Not enough beauty and youth.
And, above all, not enough time.
Yet a truly well built life contains an altogether different ingredient: elimination.
Marie Kondo became a cultural phenomenon by getting us to de-clutter our living spaces. Our most important internal space, however, is not our homes but our selves.
Just say no?
We’ve spent decades ridiculing Nancy Reagan’s naive dictum “Just Say No.”[1]While the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs can be viewed, along with criminalizing rather than rehabilitating addicts, as a policy failure, the dictum itself is not without merit. There … Continue reading
But what if we did just that, at least to the things in our lives that are less than constructive?
Drinking, working at all hours, mobile phone use. Complaining and negativity, perfectionism, toxic people. Distraction.
There is indeed a time to add things to our life, but the simple act of elimination may be our most powerful tool. It helps us declutter our psyches, bringing far greater clarity to the things we really want.
Ask the right questions
To move toward eliminating the destructive clutter from our lives it helps to ask basic questions.
What causes us feelings of regret?
What gives us, in our quiet moments, a genuine feeling of unease? What simply doesn’t feel right?
What makes us feel we’re moving away from ourselves and our core beliefs? What goes against our better judgment?
These questions are worth analyzing. These questions have answers, even if we rarely access those answers.
Substance abuse, workaholism, rushing and obsessing are a few of the ways we avoid them.
And so our lives continue—seemingly progressing at breakneck speed but, in key ways, disturbingly inert.
Sharing these matters with a well-trained mental health professional allows us the freedom to move toward these questions and then, in time, to explore them deeply. The articulation of these matters with another also gives us a greater sense of accountability to them.
Building our lives with what we want is an essential task. But before we do that it may be most effective to eliminate.
By doing so, our lives begin to look different; through eliminating things our lives become, however ironically, more substantial.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | While the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs can be viewed, along with criminalizing rather than rehabilitating addicts, as a policy failure, the dictum itself is not without merit. There are no doubt systemic problems that contribute to drug use, and yet each person is made up not simply of a series of externally imposed consequences but also internal choices. |
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