An Ode to Simplicity

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." - Socrates

The patterns of one's journey emerge over a longer timeline. We are often incapable of seeing them when we're focused on the immediacy of responding to the different stimuli in our daily existence.

Work, children, family, recreation, education and professional pursuits have a way of propagating an ever more intricate web of demands and obligations. We build slowly at first; do your remember when life was simple?

We are taught that complexity and maximizing our effect in more challenging arenas each day is a desirous and also representative of our abilities. "If you can, you must." Wear many hats becomes "please everyone."

More successes create more opportunities. More skills invite deeper opportunities to evolve. New environments offer new friends and social connections. More money acquires more things, more properties, more obligations. More complexity demands more reliance on a deeper system of (in my case) virtual assistants, coaches, therapists, accountants, lawyers, property managers, and real estate brokers. More emails, phone calls and pressing deadlines to attend to each day.

It is only when the house of cards starts to fall that we gain insight into the unsustainable demands of the life we've built. We are forced to contract when once expansion seemed so limitless. Our creativity and passion falter as the demands of a complex life suck our energy away.

Sitting in a room alone and bereft of cause or fuel is desperately lonely. It probably happens more than a few times in our lives. I've experienced it on countless occasions. It sucks. And it's usually on the tail end of when I chased something that at first seemed so meaningful and promising.

The conscious creation of a simple life that also integrates validation for our unique abilities can seem elusive. Most of us do not live in a state of self-mastery; instead we strive to accentuate our unique skills until someone else notices and rewards us for it. And then we follow the trail, dutifully and without questioning the paradigm.

When we are succeeding, this assertion might seem a little insulting. "I'm winning, so what is it I should change, oh guru," is an obvious reaction. Like a boxer riding the wave of youth, we're rarely aware of how we're expending our own capital at our own expense.

So what's the thing to do? I believe that the moments of clarity we receive on the way down, whether its the tail end of burnout, rock bottom or a slap in the face, are often the most valuable in terms of creating something intentional and simple (read, sustainable).

The thing to do is to address our deeper priorities, not the things that have latched on (In this sense, imagine remora stuck to the bottom of a great white shark. We are the shark in a spiritual sense, and the parasitic relationship slows us down.).

• Our deeper connections with with core players: children, spouses and partners, our closest friends. Not the vague associations and the people we'd so willingly lend our power to in the hopes of reward. Our co-workers, bosses and investors are not our family, even if those binary relationships offer the ease and predictability that intimacy sometimes lacks.
• The immediate needs of the day, first. Starting with self: body, mind and spirit. These take priority. It's easy to rationalize professional demands, emails, texts and phone calls as obligatory, but they aren't. They are conditionally, in that we rarely recognize the choice we make to prioritize them over self in the first place.
• The "home." The headquarters. The place we go for solace and respite and renewal. Not just the physical structure, but the things in it. Instead of new things, or ever more complex things, how about focusing on making those things shine again. Fix them, dust them, check in. I laugh sometimes at how folding laundry, washing dishes or cleaning out the car can also be spiritually grounding and cleansing acts.

These priorities become the foundation that all good things, sustainable and sustaining, come from. By nurturing and responding to this core first, or at least understanding where the debit may occur and need to be reconciled later, we create a life built on an intentional framework. In doing so, it forces out some of the things that robbed us of time and energy, and creates a simpler existence.

Most of my clients have been here. Maybe you have too? Want to break it down into something actionable? Message me or schedule a casual coffee chat here and let's see if I can help.