abundance and lack, moves toward a simpler life, “I am enough”
This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time. So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles. The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done. The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day. The rest of us are finding that if we are…
I’ve been circling around this latest concept I’ve stumbled across like I imagine an awestruck fan would do to take in Michelangelo’s Pietà at the Vatican. My head keeps going, “Wow…wow…wow.” My heart is drowning in the swelling sound of some Gregorian chant or something. OOOH! The idea that each human being’s ability to make choices can absolutely affect and shape both the forms their own lives take as well as the world in which they live is a mind-boggle…
Nipun Mehta walks his talk. He’s been doing it for over 20 years now and his walk has been highly successful at helping other people walk theirs. Mehta was a UC Berkeley computer nerd and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who witnessed and participated in the peak of the DotCom madness. By the time he was in his third year at UC Berkeley, he was at Sun Microsystems doing work that gave him what he says was more money than he…
Probably we’ve all heard the teaching stories – the ones that make us all nod as if we know something, the ones that make us mutter aphorisms and wisdom-words at each other about the consequences of greed and getting more and more. The stories are usually about some guy sitting all alone in a big old mansion on a hill somewhere. He has everything and yet he feels like he has nothing. (Usually the tale is about a guy, but,…
One day I happened to overhear a good friend of mine – one of the most generous and selflessly giving people I know – beating up on herself unmercifully. She was spazzing about how she had fallen down off her (very high) standards-of-conduct bar because she had not stopped to listen (yet again) to a high-maintenance friend’s continuing saga about how everybody was picking on her and how not-right everything in her life was.
As a Perfectionist in remission, I am here to tell you that wabi-sabi — a Japanese way of seeing the world — works as an antidote to the never-good-enough, shiny-new-thing madness induced by the classical hyper-focus on perfection and the kind of seamless orderliness that arises from the mathematical, mechanical precision that evolved in the super-industrialized Occidental West where more is always better. I grew up in a pineapple plantation camp on Molokai. Many of my neighbors were Issei, first-generation…
18th-century British textile designer, poet, writer and socialist activist William Morris famously advised: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” It’s become a sort of go-to standard that organizers, minimalists and de-clutterers of every ilk use to look at the stuff with which we all surround ourselves. These days every time you hear that phrase, you can pretty much expect that somebody is going to try to persuade you…
I’ve been beating my head on the wall I’ve made using the flood of abundance-mindset and positive-thinking books – past and present – that populate my shelves as well as articles and posts and audio tapes and video thingummies and podcasts that lurk in the spaces my computer can reach. It all sounds so good. It’s all warm and fuzzy and smiley-face cool. It’s also cotton-candy unsatisfactory. I’ve got a really bad sugar-high going and the crash is imminent, looming,…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): a disinclination to encourage catastrophic thinking and worrying. [Worst-case scenarios rarely happen. Allowing yourself to get caught up in mind-loops about them just makes you dizzy and paralyzes you.]
I was listening to a soon-to-be ex-tenant of mine ranting on about how the past two years of her life spent on a little island in the Pacific that the P.C. (Politically Correct) crowd touted as the dream place to live had been most unsatisfactory. Her body held rigidly erect as she stood flat-footed on the ground, she had thrown down her bandana and was giving up. “Going home,” she said. “I’m going home.” And then there was a truly…