LESS IS MORE
Mark’s Musing Monday Aug. 31, 2009
today’s Musing written and published from south Calgary, near Fish Creek Park
Morning walk report: 11C/48F, clear and calm our walk uneventful [except for neighbor Luke’s humans running and driving frenetically in search of their golden … only to find him hiding out close to home in Lake Mead Green] as a Monday seems different with school buses plying their routes again . . summer’s nearly done . .
Instead of thinking about, piling up or listing all the things you need to do, places you need to be and things everyone expects . . . try this: if this was your last day of life, would you be doing that thing? Is that task or project or idea what you would be working on if, unfinished, it vanished tomorrow?
Be safe
Be productive
Be effective
Be something ….
Each day these thoughts come at us; from tapes that play in our heads, or images that glare back at us in a mirror . . . or warm wishes from friends and colleagues. Who would not wish for these things? So many things to think about, so many things to do, so many things to BE
To be
That’s it . .that’s the problem. We are over BE-ing ourselves (or perhaps overbearing). What makes Monday such a grueling day is the drive to BE somewhere, BE something . . to BE what we BElieve is expected of us.
Every day this mind-candy plays out for me, to do more with less, to do more by doing less, to be simpler in so many things that simplicity becomes a better goal than big-ness or much-ness.
Can’t we just be? Isn’t less actually more? I’ve used that term so many times commenting on excess. Rather than wanting more, working for more or pushing ourselves more, we could push less, expect less, appreciate less-ness and have an easier more effective lot in life.
What if we all went out for less this week? How would we start? Imagine if, each day of the week, there was something we didn’t do?
Every day is filled with so many everyday things we believe we MUST do because we have full schedules rife with conflicts of having to be in two or three places at the same time, so many implied promises to keep . .
Be safe
Be productive
Be effective
DO LESS
Be less, want less, need less, work less, fight less, stress less – just less of everything. How tough could that be? I had a full day on my calendar, a pile and a drawer and a strung out series of things to do, projects wanting me and things I want to do… if I only get the time.
What matters, I think, is not that we discard things or do more things or that we do fewer things more effectively. What matters …. is that we don’t do anything unLESS it really matters to someone beyond ourselves.
It’s just 8AM and already, I’ve done less than usual. By noon I’ll have done far less . . if I keep up this effort, by the end of the day of doing so much less, I’ll have so much more time, energy and drive to do even less tomorrow. I could start a trend of doing even less tomorrow – by the end of the week it will feel like a vacation.
Mark Kolke
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