Practicing the SimpleLife
Eric Brown (Author)
Writer/Published Author Specialized Coaching & Counseling for Female Entrepreneurs **Hire Eric for One on One Coaching **Help with Your Transition **Help with Having a GrowingFREE SimpleLife
The Morning SunRises are the essence of a SimpleLife,....For Me.
We aren’t ever done with the odd business of becoming that most extraordinary and prized of things, an emotionally mature person—or, to put it a simpler way, an almost grown-up adult.
-Easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.
-Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers.
-Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more yoga.
It takes no effort
to miss the friends we didn’t make
the work we didn’t do
the people we didn’t marry
the children we didn’t have.
It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be.
It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
It is problematic, therefore, that so many of the central truths of life have an elemental simplicity to them that violates our predilections for difficulty and maintains some of the innocent plainness of a parable.
-To hear that we should understand rather than condemn
-That others are primarily anxious rather than cruel
-That every strength of character we admire bears with it a weakness we must forgive:
These are both key laws of psychology and entirely familiar truisms of the sort that we have been taught to disdain.
Yet despite their so-called obviousness, simple-sounding emotional dynamics are aggressively capable of ruining extended periods of our lives.
-We should gracefully acknowledge how much of what nourishes and guides us, how much of what we should be hearing, is astonishingly, almost humiliatingly, simple in structure.
-We should not compound our problems by insisting on elevated degrees of mystery, or allow our emotional intelligence to be clouded by a murkiness that would be legitimate only in the advanced sciences.
-Our vulnerability to basic psychological error is no more absurd, and no less poignant, than the fact that an adult can be killed by a well-aimed pebble or that we can die for want of a glass of water.
-Simplicity should never insult our intelligence; it should remind us to be nimble in our understanding of what intelligence comprises.
"We need to be sophisticated enough not to reject a truth because it sounds like something we already know. We need to be mature enough to bend down and pick up governing ideas in their simplest guises. We need to remain open to vast truths that can be stated in the language of a child. It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on". ~Matt Haig
-People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction.
-People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward even larger houses and ever longer commutes.
-People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well.
-People would be happier, and in the long run and wealthier, if they bought basic functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption
We spend almost everything we have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features. ~Jonathan Haidt
What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, and empty of meaning.
There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
So, I end with Chasing SunSets and SunRises, as they seem to provide much simple clarity in a complex world we navigate,......, a path to the SimpleLife
Pondering Staying in the Middle,..........
“Everything is either developing from nothingness or moving on the path towards nothingness”
Wabi sabi is a full understanding of the flawed, imperfect, and transitory nature of life and everything in it.
This is something we can cultivate by noticing the details of nature and having total delight with all that it brings. It is giving meaning to the thing that happen in the world by experiencing It first-hand rather than judging things from the side.
It is all about letting go of all you know and allowing your sense to take over. All it means is paying attention to the deeper things that life has to offer.
Once you can be content with what you have, not worried about the things you have no control over, you have given yourself the license to see the beautiful side of the days as they come, allowing yourself to be moved by it which means that you become grateful for all life has given you.
About Eric
Eric is a Writer / Published Author / Practicing Poet & Photographer
Reiki Master / Flower Farmer / Life Coach
Real Estate Developer / Apartment Operator
Modern Elder / Nomad / Entrepreneur
Find Eric’s Books, Courses & Coaching Offerings here; https://linktr.ee/ericurbane
Find Eric’s Photos here; https://growingfreesimplelife.picfair.com/
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Eric is an Entrepreneur, and lives a Nomadic Lifestyle and is an OffGrid Practitioner. He is also an Instructor for Melina Emerson Small Biz Lady and an Adjunct Instructor at Drexel University. Eric is well seasoned in urban housing development.
He has built and developed over 14,000 market rate apartments on a national scale. He founded Urbane Apartments in 2000 and oversaw new business, general operations, marketing and branding at the company until retiring in 2021.
He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience. He also established Urbane Media, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested.
Eric has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.