After the Ball was Over

There is an old poem about After The Ball, describing how the Belle of the Ball takes her appearance apart - down to the wooden leg and glass eyes, commenting on the illusion of her perfection. It always amused me as a child, and now that the wrapping paper is cleared and binned, and Christmas dinner sufficiently digested for me to move and think again, I'm left with that deflated sense of inevitability – this comes round every year, this mass of hysteria, excitement, endless food and drink and sociability, and far more packaging around everything than necessary. And now all the sales are on. Now everything we just spend money on is half price or less, and it makes me wonder how much the margin is pushed up before Christmas, if prices can be so severely slashed straight after. And why do we bother with presents on the day when it would save so much to buy them even one day late. Yes, it is about the day itself, but when I walk – or attempt to – down Oxford Street on Boxing Day, I have to wonder when we all went so insane at the prospect of a bargain, and how the hell anyone has any money left after all the pre-Christmas consumer madness. 

Scrooged

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. When everything extraneous is gone, all that’s left is the space it once took up, opened up to choices and potential. Unemcumbered is a lighter way to live. We’ve convinced ourselves of the worth of the material trappings of wealth and fame – but that’s just what they are: a trap.

We know, and at this time of year we spend a lot of money celebrating the fact, that the really important things in life aren’t material: goodwill and tolerance towards others, compassion, fellowship, peace on earth.

So to hammer home this point to ourselves, we spend months listening to endless carols playing under endless miles of tinsel around endless shops full of endless offers buying endless presents – and I sound like Scrooge.

But the point Dickens was trying to make wasn’t about Scrooge hoarding his material wealth, it was about Scrooge needing to reach out to other people, to overcome his lonely misanthropy and so find warmth and joy in other people.

I won’t pretend I don’t find the endlessness of the festive season tedious. I do. It seems to start in August and last until February, what with the after-Christmas sales and credit card hangover.  By the time we finally limp there, the day itself is a let-down – all hype, and then it’s over. So why do we put ourselves through all this? Why not just simplify it to what we repeatedly tell ourselves it’s about: people treating people like people?

Free ourselves up from the endless mall-crawl and present-buying-panic to spend some time with other people without seeing them as something to tick off our to-do lists. Isn’t that closer to what Christmas is supposed to be about?

Organiser

Maybe I’m just strange, maybe it’s because it’s pretty much my job, but I find a simple pleasure in organising. In filing. In taking piles upon piles of complete and utter chaos and sorting them all neatly into coherence. Even – who am I kidding? Especially – when that includes binning them.  I’ve had to do a lot of this lately, inputting data from Invoice A into Cost Monitor B and checking that my books still appear to balance. Or at worst, only wobble a little bit. And I’ve been wondering as I go through the whole process of ‘month end’ for the projects I’m working on: why is it so hard to do this in my personal life? I organise and file and tidy and update and monitor and co-ordinate all day – it’s what I’m paid for. Is it overload that stops me from spending the few minutes it would take to update and organise my own life?

When I get home, the last thing I want to do is more of what feels and looks like work – I’m fairly normal that way. The trouble is, my reluctance only makes the task loom larger and more impossible in my mind. After all, if it only takes me 30 minutes to transfer all the complex multi-layered information from a 6-page invoice into the relevant cost codes and categories of the equally complex and multi-layered cost monitor, then my own personal finances are more likely to take up 5 minutes. To reconcile the whole month. All of which makes me somewhat ashamed that I haven’t done all this already. 

Mind Over Matter

I have a lot of bad habits, and there are a lot of better habits I’d like to form – but tend not to, because I am a lazy little sod and it’s easier to stay in the familiar rut than put in the hard work to improve myself and my life. I’m getting better at it, though. Vastly better, and the secret is… that there isn’t one. The thing is, as trite as it sounds, AA has one major point: you can’t fix anything until you admit the problem.

Temptation is hard to resist, and I’m particularly good at rationalising caving into it. But if I take a microsecond to point out to myself that I am rationalising, I am just finding excuses to do something I know that, long-term, I don’t actually want to do, that’s a big help. Step away from the rationalising Id and let it ramble on, but don’t actually act on what it’s saying. Just breathe, and in a little while, the Id will get bored (it has the attention span of a two-year-old) and move onto the next impulse – and you won’t have given in.

If the Id doesn’t move on, try arguing with it – rationally – because measured logic will often defeat a toddler’s argument.

Our minds are powerful, persuasive and multi-layered. If we can harness that power, we can change absolutely anything we want. And that’s a staggering thought.

‘Twas The Month Before Xmas…

Looking at my calendar, I am struck by the fact there are 4 weeks until Christmas. You’d think I’d’ve noticed before, what with the advertising and the ‘special offers’ and tawdry tinsel everywhere. But for once, I have managed to stay pretty much Holidays-free so far. This is very good news for my patience. If I could make one global rule it would be to ban all xmas advertising, decorations and music until December 1^st. Because it’s all so overblown these days. I’m not religious, I’m not arguing for the Christian message to be the focus of the season, and yes, it is a nice – if somewhat misplaced – idea to have a time of year when we’re reminded to be grateful for what we have and pleasant to our fellow humans, but I don’t see why a celebration of returning hope in the depths of winter has become a consumerist orgy starting in August and running through until (with all the post-xmas sales) about March.

I’m not proposing the radical No Buying approach of Leo Babauta, just that we don’t go overbarod, into debt and generally insane about it.

I’ve been invited to join 7 Secret Santa schemes so far. I don’t see what purpose could possibly be served by me spending money on something generic for someone I don’t even know – because I know from receiving such gifts that it’ll probably just gather dust in a cupboard or be instantly re-gifted. So far, I’ve declined all invitations, and if that makes me a Scrooge, so be it. I’d rather keep a sense of perspective as to what the holiday season should really be about – gratitude, tolerance, peace and goodwill – than try to score social points by conspicuous splurging.

Energy Levels

The Law of the Conservation of Energy, as stated in the 1800s, tells us that total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed and transferred. These are the scientific facts, in our universe. Which is interestingly similar to the position of Oriental philosophy, with the concept of Chi and how it flows. According to physics, everything is made of atoms, and atoms themselves are made of charge and empty space. Charge is energy – so everything is made of energy (generally chemical potential energy, if I recall my high school science correctly). If I accept this scientific information, then it’s not really such a stretch to get to the idea of energy flowing, as in Eastern practices from martial arts to Feng Shui. The law of the Conservation of Energy lends itself to a person being able to borrow energy from her opponent to then use against them (a central principle of yin or internal martial arts such as tai chi, wing chun and chi kung).

This idea is  should enable us to manipulate the flow of energy to avoid feeling drained – if everything is energy, and the total amount of energy remains constant, and energy flows, then all we need to do is find a way to put ourselves in the way of that flow and absorb as much energy as we need to emit: as movement, as heat, as whatever form is required.

We live on borrowed energy then – all of us, all the time. 

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

I hear a lot about mindfulness these days. It seems to be the buzz-word of choice, especially around minimalism and Zen forums, but it’s still just a repackaging of ‘living in the moment’ or ‘being present,’  both of which hark back to ancient Eastern philosophies. The idea is that by focussing on our immediate environment and situation, we can slow down from the frantic rush of our lives and appreciate what we have. It’s all very well and idealistic, but the fact remains that we are creatures of time, and we have to plan for the future, as much as we try to learn from rehashing the past. It enriches our experience to have the contrast of memories, hopes, dreams and reality.

If I was truly ‘mindful’ I wouldn’t dream about the future, wouldn’t make grand plans and schemes to achieve. If we didn’t look at the past, how would we ever learn who we are, or how to deal with situations that are new to us, but not to our parents, our ancestors. In the cup of the hand, there may only be the present, which is trite enough without remembering that hands don’t make very good cups: they tend to leak, and as the water spills, we’re not holding it anymore, only its memory.

So I’ll continue, regardless of the zeitgeist pop-philosophers, to live my life in all three tenses, and live it all the more fully for that. 

Tangled Red Tape

Why do we make our lives soo much more complicated than they need to be? I’ve been trying to plan a road trip for next summer. Should be easy, right? In principle, anyway: a bike, some money, spare clothes, full tank, maybe even a phrase book and off I go… Or not.

Because EU passport or not, I’ve still got to think about routes, mileage, daily coverage, ferry schedules, ferry bookings, EU regulations, and the list never gets any shorter. We, as a society, have now made even the simplest trip incredibly complicated. This is, granted, compounded by living on an island. First thing to do is to get off the island and that automatically means a wrestle with means of transport, schedules, prices and arcane bookings interfaces.

I’m looking at 4000 miles of beautiful roads, and all I can do is get bogged down in the details of how far, how long, how much, how many.

My head is swimming with lists of things to organise, things to do, to book, to pay for. I’m starting to look forward to this trip because once it starts the logistical nightmare of organising it all will be over. And I can, to an extent, relax.

You’d never think, given the chaos in my brain over all of this, that logistics is a large part of what I do for a living. It’s mildly laughable how much more organised I am for work than in my own life, but that could well be because I spend most of my day organising work, and don’t really have much time left to organise my own life.

It's a small world after all

The Euro’s in crisis, most of the developed world is in hock up to its eyebrows and the super-rich are still super-rich. Bankers still, even when working for government-owned (i.e. bailed out) banks, get big bonuses and politicians are struggling to come up with any solutions because they’re in bed with big business as well as the electorate. And neither businesses nor politicians are particularly good at long-term planning. They think in terms of financial quarters and electoral terms. This is not sounding like a pleasant scenario for the world economy. Especially when you consider that the developing economies are heavily reliant on trade with the developed world for their own stability. We have outsourced our call centres, customer service centres, IT support to India and our electronics manufacture to the Far East. If we can’t afford to buy the products that use the services, then countries like Japan, China and India will see a slow-down, if not a full-blown obsession.

Our world has become so interconnected and so small that we can no longer insulate ourselves from geographically distant events: the UK is blind if it thinks the Euro zone crisis doesn’t affect it – at least 50% of UK trade is with the EU. I work in television, and as arty as that sounds, we’ve been hit by the shortages created by the tsunami (and subsequent nuclear meltdown) in Japan, which has wiped out suppliers of key technical components.

It would be nice to think that this interconnection of all our economies would promote at least a tolerance between our cultures and religions, but that’s wishful thinking. Because it requires an awareness of the wider world, and also the act of thinking. Which apparently isn’t as simple as it sounds. 

Pure and Simple Every time

Simplifying my life has had an unexpected side-effect. I should have thought it through; logically, I could have predicted this. When you simplify, you focus more on what remains. This is the attraction of minimalism – there are so few objects in the room that each one stands out all the more. The effect of simplifying is to intensify, to concentrate, what remains. To make what remains stand out, shorn of extraneous embellishments and complications – purified.

And maybe that’s why minimalist philosophies go on about “living in the moment” – because when you take away the past and the future, and all the added complications that go with memory and anticipation – what’s left is enhanced, focussed, concentrated and somehow pure. And however unfamiliar it may feel, I find I like the intensity of that. 

Flow

There is a principle, in various Eastern philosophies as well as martial arts, often credited (by the West) to Bruce Lee: Be Like Water. It’s not about hard or soft, but about adaptability, and the acceptance of change. Water takes the shape of its container, it runs down the path of least resistance – water adapts. The natural state of life is change, and as much as it scares most people, we need to learn to live with it. To deal with it, to at least attempt to embrace it. The problem is, we’re so busy filling our hours with appointments and to-do lists and strictly defined goals and deadlines, the idea of any unexpected developments is terrifying. It’ll throw our whole day off plan. If my boiler breaks down and floods my house and all my things are ruined? How much insurance and work and time will it take to repair and replace everythign as it was? The Eastern philosophies that expoudn the Be Like Water principle tend to promote minimalism as an ideal lifestyle – the promote having enough, and no more or no less. The idea behind it is the chill-out principle. On holiday, on weekends, we can breathe, and do nothing or whatever takes our fancy. We can chill. We can experience what the Scandinavians call hygge (which doesn’t really translate, but expresses a kind of combination of chilling + cosiness + camaraderie better lived than explained). If we live simply enough, not bogged down with extraneous possessions and commitments, the idea is that we will be more relaxed and more able to adapt, and just go with the flow.

Not Worth The Jail Time

I lack patience. The older I get, the less patience I possess and the shorter my attention span seems to get. Traffic lights, pedestrians, the car in front of me, indecisive shoppers, disorientated tourists – I am not good at waiting. I never really have been. But it’s not worth the trouble it would cause to lose my cool every time I have to delay gratification. It’s not socially acceptable to scream and swear at every red light, every pedestrian, tourist, shopper, every small delay or obstacle. So all that’s left is to take a deep breath, count to ten, consider the repercussions of possibly taking a little longer to do something than I’d ideally like to take. Those consequences are seldom serious, seldom life- or even job-threatening, seldom significant enough to register on the grander scale of things that will still make my blood boil tomorrow, that really: losing my temper and murdering the cause of my frustration? Not worth the jail time. (Assume meditative pose and repeat until smiling).

The second best time

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” ~Chinese Proverb

We live so fast in these modern cities. Technological progress no longer marches, it sprints. Any new computer development has a half-life of six months before it’s obsolete. And all of it is geared toward giving us instant gratification: fast food, broadband, microwaves, smart phones, IM. Reality television, talent shows like X Factor. Andy Warhol may have talked about 15 minutes of fame, but we seem to have taken that as the length of time required to achieve fame and fortune. Meanwhile we know that anything we do achieve so instantly, doesn’t last.

What matters is track record, is the ability to achieve results over and over again. Instant gratification culture has left us with an overdose of one-hit-wonders and flashes in the pan. Is it any wonder we’re starting to set more store by track record again? It’s a slow, subtle, almost undetectable shift, but it’s there: in the growing Slow Food movement, in the downsizing trend, even in the Green movement. Some people are starting to realise that we can’t always greenhouse everything, and nor should we.

Crops take time to grow, even with fertilisers, irrigation, pesticides and GM seeds. Quality takes time to create – we all know we make more mistakes, do a shoddier job when we rush things. So why do we, perpetually, feel the need to rush? If enough of us opt out of this incomprehensible “need for speed” the dominant paradigm will shift, change down a couple of gears and we can enjoy the scenery again, knowing that we will still reach the destination, just with richer memories of the ride.

The Money’s Not Important

The rich and famous often annoy the rest of us by claiming – often in interviews read by fans -  that the money and the fame they receive aren’t important. And they’re right. Like oxygen, recognition and money aren’t important until they’re in short supply. It’s when they’re scarce that their importance becomes apparent.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the freedom of scarcity, of having enough and no more. But that’s the trick – to have enough. More is unnecessary, but less is stressful. The choice to make do with fewer things is a difficult one when we’re constantly bombarded by messages of abundance and endless choice – but choice is a decision, and sometimes it’s more relaxing not to have one to make. The choice is to fill life with non-material things, with experience and feeling rather than objects and mile-long task lists for acquiring yet more things.

The choice is not to try to make do with less than we actually need to live comfortably – cutting down too much will only leave me stressed and worried and struggling. Which is hardly the objective. But to have just enough, and not be encumbered by extraneous bits and pieces – oh, that would feel lighter, and free…

Pity the process of establishing what is just enough and no more is such a trial and error one. 

Little Sister Leaving Town

So, work wants to send me to the Scotland office for 5 weeks. Well, they’re talking about it, anyway.

5 weeks is an awkward length of time. It’s not quite enough to rent a flat, but a bit too long for a hotel room. Which has a knock-on effect in terms of laundry, and therefore packing. I did a 2 week trip around Europe this summer, packed on the basis of a 6 day clothing turnaround. But holidays, especially road-trips, are different because nobody is going to notice if you wear the same T-shirt twice. But the idea of a 5 week long business trip is somewhat more daunting.

My first stop, of course, was www.onebag.com, quickly followed by a fascinating detour around www.journeywoman.com, which is a perennially favourite site. Unfortunately, my job entails a more casual dress code than most. So my options, it seems, are either to follow the business travel advice and over-dress in the office, or pack a bigger bag with more jeans. And a travel washing line and hangers (because hotel hangers seldom detach from the closet, which makes then useless for hanging around the room to dry clothes. This is partly to stop guests nicking the hangers, yes, but more to make guests pay for overpriced hotel laundry services).

The general consensus is that separates are easier than dresses, and neutrals (especially black) are easier than colours or patterns. The most basic units could almost describe the infamous capusal wardrobes of Susie Faux: a suit, a shawl or pashmina, a few shirts (non-iron), a casual option and a sweater or cardigan, along with adaptable shoes. And something that never occurred to me, and now I can’t think why not: a versatile small handbag – one that can do lunch, dinner or cocktails with equal ease, that’s smaller than a laptop bag and decidely not your carry-on. 

Simples

The meerkat mafia are back. This time as fluffy toys for those who use the insurance broker they advertise. Use website = get toy. Simples. Yes? No. Gimmick. Why would I want, as an adult, to acquire a fluffy toy? Particularly a branded one. I have no need or desire for one, and yet somehow, the cute-fluffy aspect is supposed to draw me in, make me putty in the advertisers hands.

I like meerkats. I grew up with them in the garden. They’re very cute, especially the babies. But they’re also aggressive wild animals, hunting down and devouring the insect and invertebrate population. I like my meerkats alive and animated and in their natural environment, being meerkats. Not wearing smoking jackets and lab coats, talking with incongruous Russian accents and trying to sell me insurance services I don’t need by throwing in a cute-fluffy gimmick I really actually don’t want.

I have to wonder what age-group the advertising agency think the product is aimed at. The same goes for its rivals. Lately the ad campaigns seem to find a concept, a gimmick and then ride it in increasingly complicated ways until long after the legs fall off. Especially when selling things like insurance, TV chat shows or anything health related. Things that tend ot have something of an easy market because they’re selling something people need (legally if not actually). So, ad men, if I might make a suggestion: think about the product: what it is, who will actually spend hard-earned cash on it. Then aim it at them, not at some patronising concept of their mental age just because you like to make things overly-complicated because you think that somehow makes you look more intelligent than the overawed client signing off on it. Then maybe, if I need it, I’ll buy.

Simples. Yes?

Automaton

Ford is rolling out its MyKey technology to Europe. This will enable parents to pre-program set speed-limits, radio volume, and seatbelt and fuel reminders. It can also be used to prevent certain safety features, like blind spot detection and parking assistance from being deactivated. The idea is that parents will set the key, and their new-driver offspring will then only use that key to borrow the car. Simpler, safer – nothing to worry about, surely?

Well – driving a car is a pretty complicated process. It takes a combination of skills, which are learned while travelling at higher speeds than human naturally achieve. It also takes observation, concentration, the ability to react and perform various simultaneous muscle movements in response to something outside the immediate in-car environment. This isn’t easy, and yes, inexperienced drivers are more likely to be in accidents than experienced ones. But as safety features increase, and more and more of the driving process is taken over by computerised systems, and the driver’s job made simpler, it seems to me that this will ultimately result in ever more complications: computers crashing or hanging at high speed, drivers who haven’t the skills to take manual control in emergencies or unpredicatble conditions. If we made the cars simpler again, then learning to drive might be more complex, but driving itself would be easier – we’d drive in the knowledge that we can control the car and handle the situations we’re likely to encounter. And isn’t that certainty simpler than feeling out of control, managed by computers?

Simple isn’t always what it looks like at first glance. 

Balancing Act

According to Zen philosophy, “simplicity is the exact balance between too much and too little.”

This echoes the arch over the temple at Delphi – meden agan – nothing in excess. It seems that it’s an age-old problem, this attempt at moderation in all aspects of our lives. Which implies that it’s something we’re really not very good at achieving, if we haven’t figured out how yet.

How do I decide what’s too much or too little? A lack is easier to define than an excess, most of the time. Lack implies an unmet need. Excess? Well, that implies waste and redundancy. I’ve questioned how many shoes/jeans/shirts I need – and yet, the way we live our lives makes Thoreau’s advice on wearing a single outfit until it falls to rags somewhat impractical. We are visual, however much we want to deny it, and we’re also acquisitive. This isn’t cultural, it’s survival. We are the descendants of those who made sure they had at least enough – food, shelter, warmth – because they’re the ones who survived to procreate and raise their children. It’s just that we’ve now reached the point at which some of us have far more than we really need, and we’ve created an entire, multi-billion dollar industry – hell, economic structure – on the basis of manufacturing need.

Zen philosophy runs counter to this mindset of material acquisition – and that’s why most of us find it so difficult and also so intriguing. I’m searching for the balance – between the culture in which I live and work and the attraction of a simpler philosophy. It’s a fine line, and I strongly suspect, sketched in feathered pencil. 

No Particular Place to Go

It doesn’t take much to make me happy – an open road, a full tank, no deadlines and no particular place to go. I’m stuck at my desk, looking out on a beautiful summer day, and my to-do list is suddenly irrelevant. My job deals in the intangible but my taste in pleasure is simple and solid: a motorcycle, tarmac, time.

The growling purr of the engine, the feeling of endless raw power and the miles rolling by… There is a biker slogan, found on T-shirts, mugs, bandanas, bumper-stickers, you name it: If I Have To Explain, You Wouldn’t Understand.

I might be a writer by nature, but I’m a biker by blood. So call me a petrolhead, a rebel, dangerous, antisocial, anarchic - call me anything you want – I’ll just put my lid on, hook my comms to my iPod, and follow my heartbeat out onto the backroads: discovering new villages, monuments, forests, pubs – places I wouldn’t discover by train or plane or car, because on a bike there’s no metal between me and the environment. There’s a reason we call cars cages.

At the end of the day, when I park up and swing my feet back onto the ground, I’m tired, but exhilirated. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what’s important? That we enjoy the journey, the experience, so if the particular place we end up in isn’t quite the one we had in mind, at least we have that sense of satifisfaction, of simple pleasure, from the ride...

Wealth of Nations

“The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniencies and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.” – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776

In the wake of widespread rioting, looting and vandalism, the question in the media is “Why?” There’s no clear political motivation or focus to it. There’s a lot of pointing and wagging of fingers, comments about the wealth divide (chasm) and immigration causing disaffection and socio-economic apathy among the youth.

There are accusations that it’s economic policy, cuts and the dismal international financial outlook that caused this. But the truth is far simpler: this is caused primarliy by boredom, but also by instant gratification and consumerism.

We live, in the developed world, in a highly materialist society, that judges value and success in material and monetary terms. We pretty much always have – see Adam Smith’s comment above.

And it doesn’t help that we glamourise and romanticise criminals, pirates and outlaws in our popular fiction. We’ve forgotten that an outlaw once meant someone truly outside the law – legally dead and without any rights.

In the current economic climate, there are a lot of young people out of school, out of work, out of cash and Bored. For them, civil disobedience and the idea of something for nothing is an appealing change of pace. It’s Freud’s Id unleashed: see= want= take= have, and it continues because there’s no fulfilment in the new possession. People are posting pictures of themselves to the web, with all their loot displayed – which may be criminally stupid, but speaks to a need for attention and affirmation – look at the things I now have, and see me as successful.

If we didn’t place, as a society, such an emphasis on conspicuous material wealth as indicative of success and value, perhaps the wave of looting and destruction across the UK wouldn’t have been so widespread or so severe. 

360°

In broadcast media, the buzzword is “360°”. This is supposed to mean multi-platform programming, although nobody really seems to understand what that is, beyond online catch-up and facebook pages for shows. The theory is that you let viewers access content (or bits of content) via different media/platforms and then interact with the content more than in the traditional broadcast model. It doesn’t really work that way in practice. The closest most shows get to User Generated Content (despite the great work done during the writers’ strike a couple of years ago) is red-button/premium phone voting, and facebook and web-forum sniping.

The fact is that we’re not very good at focussing on more than one thing at a time, or watching multiple screens or windows simultaneously (which is almost certainly why those annoying ads with the automatic unmutable sound were invented. We’re better with multi-layered sounds than visuals).

At work, we opend several documents/windows and jump from one to the other to the first, cross-referecing, updating, task-hopping and calling it multi-tasking when in fact it’s more like hopscotch – leaping from one point of precariously balance to the next in an attempt to get it all done.

In certain martial arts styles, you learn to block and strike simultaneously – which is damn difficult because the big, unspoken failing of multi-tasking is that humanity isn’t very good at rubbing its stomach while patting its head.

Any steps I take to simplify life has to deal with this fact. Trying to streamline my time by multi-tasking seems almost doomed to failure, unless I can somehow translate the martial arts skills to the rest of my life – once, of course, I manage to acquire them. After all, driving a car (which I’ve been doing for years now) requires a certain amount of multi-tasking, mainly on a purely physical-memory level, allowing the consciousness to pay attention to the road ahead, the conversation in the car, the song on the radio, the directions being followed.

Maybe that’s the root of the pat-head-rub-stomach issue – that we tend to think about it too much when it should be muscle memory, which would allow us the consciousness to think about how stupid we look.

Tense and complicated

Time dilation, officially, is the observed difference of elapsed time between two points moving relative to each other, or differently situated from nearby gravitational masses. A will see B’s clock ticking at a slower rate than his. This effect is down to the nature of space-time described by the theory of relativity.

Time dilation, unofficially, is a perception of the rate of the passage of time, and doesn’t require movement or gravity. When we’re absorbed in something, time either dilates or contracts – because we don’t notice it. Martial arts often talk about, and train to get into The Zone, a.k.a. the moment. They do this because when you are not worried about past or future, but are entirely absorbed in the present, you react better to the dynamics of a situation – almost as if your focus is buying you more time to react.

I wonder if this time dilation effect is why so many philosophies focus on The Moment and being present in it? If you are in the present – no worries about past or future – then the world is simple. The simpler things are, the more they purport to help you stay in the moment, which in turn simplifies things. (This is circular at best – if you’re only concerned with the present, then your needs and wants are lessened and simplified as when you’re travelling).

As children, we get absorbed in things so easily, we don’t really notice time passing. As adults, that purity of focus is rarer, and we notice time more. We clock-watch our days away in boring jobs, ticking off lists of things we have to, rather than want to, do. We stretch our seconds ever thinner, and think ever more of things we should have done or need to plan for. No wonder we get so tense, when our lives become so complicated.

In my attempts to find the simple life, maybe I’m missing the point – maybe what I should be looking for the Present life – forgetting the past and future tenses, and living in the moment, however twee and New Age that sounds. When I practise the Buddhist 3 Arrivals, the world seems to slow, the blur of noise and colours and whirlign shapes resovling into something comprehensible.

I’m starting to think it’s not a coincidence after all, that in English “now” and “here” are both covered by the word “present”.

Simple Minds

A number of intelligent people through history have agreed with da Vinci, regarding simplicity as a sophistication, as only arising from complexity. And yet, at the same time, simple has been used as an insult, as a description for those who don’t – or won’t grasp the complextities of the world. This dichotomy complicates the whole question of simplicity and its desirability.

On the sophisticated side, simplicity is an essence, the distillation of the complex into its pure, concentrated, simple form. Like hieroglyphics or Oriental calligraphy, it’s the expression of a complex idea in a few brush-strokes.

On the other hand, simple is the opposite of complex – it is easy to grasp and understand because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be simple. Right? Um.

The big questions are deceptively simple: why are we here, what is love, why is the sky blue? They’re simple to ask, but not to answer because they require careful thought to process the question and construct an answer – assuming an answer other than a glib “Because” (however tempting).

Taoists believe there is a natural balance – and to simplify anything beyond its natural state is in fact to complicate it, which makes the issue somewhat recursive, and the relation ship between simple and complex more – well – complicated. Is it possible that both definitions of “simple” are correct?

More to the point, can simple minds grasp the simple – big – questions better than complicated ones? If they can, then surely complicated people like me should strive to sophisticate our minds to a point where we can grapple with the big mysteries?

Simplicity is Complex

According to author Jayce O’Neal, simple –well – isn’t. That’s an interesting thought. Are my efforts to streamline my life ultimately self-defeating? Da Vinci thought simplicity was the ultimate sophistication, which philosophy might be the inspiration for the iLife and Cloud computing, but seems somewhat at odds with what I’m trying to do.

All right, so I came across the term in a martial arts context – used there to illustrate the fact that what a Grandmaster makes look simple the student finds incredibly complex. I think, though, that the idea may have a wider application.

The general process of streamlining reminds me of Langton’s Ant (a computer model that has been used to illustrate the limitations of relying on a Theory of Everything). At first, the simple set rules of the module create a simple pattern, and then the cycle appears to generate chaos before eventually settling into a pattern – is this what da Vinci and O’Neal were on about?

Langton’s Ant and other models like it demonstrate (graphically. Try putting it into YouTube.com) that a simple rule, a simple system can lead to complex, chaotic patterns, and that chaos is the entropic state of the universe, so any order we impose is by definition complex, thus simplicity as we understand it is an illusion because it stands against the tendency of the universe toward disorder, and so the very order we impose in streamlining anything (much less our lives) is only simple in appearance, not in conception or execution.

However mentally M C Escher this may be as a concept, it doesn’t change my desire to simplify – ok, streamline – my life. 

What are you? A centipede?

I have too many clothes. In particular, I have too many shoes. And I can jsutify every last pair, which is a problem. The bottom of my wardrobe is a tangle of stilettos, wedges, courts, boots, riding boots, sandals, flat shoes and trainers, all tumbling over each other in a fruitless search for space. And I only have, including slippers, 20 pairs. This is not a lot for a woman. My male friends raise their eyebrows and disbelieve that last comment, until forced to consider their girlfriends/mothers/sisters’ collections.

Why is it that men can get away with two or three pairs of shoes, and yet women like me feel the need to own many? As much as we shake our heads at her excess, most women understand where Imelda Marcos was coming from with her collection. I don’t know why it is, but I genuinely like 5-inch stilettos. I can walk in them, dance all night in them, and I love how tall they make me. I own 3 pairs and seldom go anywhere that jsutifies wearing them. And yet I cannot bring myself to throw them out.

Really, I shouldn’t need more shoes than a man; I should be able to survive on 5 pairs – two smart, two casual, and in my case, riding boots. Even allowing for seasonal changes, that’s only 10 pairs. So why the hell do I feel I need double that?

Is it what I spent on them? Well, I don’t spend that much (ie, don’t have that much to spend) and I have fussy feet to boot. Is it that, as seldom as I wear some pairs, there are outfits that don’t work without them? (And what does that say about the relative value of female appearance to male?) Is it a deep-seated desire to have options, in case, as some subverted remnant of our survival instincts? Or are we just magpies when it comes to shiny and new?

Whichever it is, I must surely be able to survive on 15 pairs, getting rid of 5. So begins the painful process of deciding which ones.

Simple Minds

It hasn't been a good week. Come to that, today isn't being a good day either. Mostly because my mind has never been great at multitasking and currently feels it's drowning, flailing in a sea of thoughts.
Wouldn't it be useful if pensieves really existed? If we could siphon off the excess clutter and simply our thoughts?
Meditation is a way to do that, but it takes time and practice to get to the point of stillness, of immersion in the now.
Riding is a way to do that - everything peripheral is subsumed in the joy of the moment, in concentration on the road now and the road ahead.
And theoretically, if space-time is a continuum, then simplifying space should help. Sigh. Back to clearing out the closet i suppose.
Was my old school principal right in telling us every term that tidy cupboards meant tidy minds? As a thought, that's almost worrying.

Rocket Science

Einstein said that “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”

I love this quote, if only because it makes me feel a bit better about my indifferent success at simplifying my life. Einstein was far brainier than me, after all. Okay, so he wasn’t talking about life as much as science, and simplifying has to be simpler than rocket science. But still. It’s nice to think that certified genii have thought along the same lines, and hit upoon a level beyond which simplifying is dangerous because overdone.

I was having a look at the 4 Hour Work Week as well, and one of the things that struck me was that it’s really not that simple. Or necessarily that effective. Just efficient.

Efficiency = work done/ time.

Effective = impact of the work done, regardless of time taken.

Efficient gets things done. Effective gets the right things done. Yes, to outsource the nitty gritty of your life to a subcontinental call centre or agent gets things done, leaving you free to get more of the right things done. But if the minutiae is so voluminous as to warrant outsourcing, I have to wonder if it’s all necessary.

I admit, I am far too much of a control freak about my life and my affairs to wantonly hand over control to a stranger in a another country. Even when I had holdings in two countires, my agent where I didn’t live was a relative. I am far to technocynical to trust the Cloud and the internet as a safe place for all my personal details. It’s far too easy to hack, and identity theft is on the rise. It may be Luddite of me, but I like to be in control of my own accounts, my own life. It gives me the illusion of controlling my own future. But cynicism and paranoia aside, surely it both simpler and more effective to apply the Einstein quote – and first make your life as simple as possible, before paying someone else to take over the small-print of your to-do list? Because you may well find that it’s no longer worthwhile (much less necessary) to outsource anything at all. And you’ll still have a lot more free time on your hands than you’re used to.

Return to Complexcity

It has been something of a struggle to reacclimatise to London life. I’ve never really had Post Holiday Syndrome before, but I did this time. It’s that flustered trance in which you walk around for a week while trying to get your head around a) the 1003 emails in your inbox, b) the leftover stuff from your last project, c)  the logistics of the new project, as well as d) all the logistical life stuff: exercise, commuting, washing, shopping, rent, bills, contracts, fees, ironing, filing, shredding and cleaning.

Life is bewilderingly, almost depressingly complex, especially in a megacity. A large part of me wants to pull the duvet over my head and opt out for a few more days or  weeks.

I have tried to make the transition back to my usual life as gradual as possible, to make it less shocking, less jarring, but it’s still a bumpy ride. I guess the problem is that while I was travelling, my world shrank to the present, as it does on the road, even as my horizons expanded, as they do when you experience new places and things.

Is this where the iLife falls down? Because it must bring all the complexity of modern urban life with it – even if it’s all online, all virtual. You still have to worry about, exercise, commuting, washing, shopping, rent, bills, contracts, fees, ironing, firewalls, encryption and cleaning. Granted, if you take it to the extreme of living in a hotel, you can lose cleaning – and probably washing, ironing and shopping from that list, but it creates more in the way of rent and fees. Simpler in concept, but not necessarily simpler in execution (depending on how many different people you end up paying and how long between hotel bills).

I have been researching ways to ease back in:  taking my lunch break outside the building, not staying later than necessary, prioritising and saying no. But the trouble with easing back in is that you still end up back in the thick of it. And I don’t want that. I’d like to try to keep some small semblance of the simplicity of my life on the road in my normal day-to-day. I’d like to find a way to stay waist-deep at most in the swirling currents of hectic city life, not be swept again out of my depth.

head out on the highway

Having just returned from one adventure, I'm already looking for the next one. As inviting as home is,  I've always been susceptible to the Road Trip. I have an itchy throttle hand as well as itchy feet. I want to explore the world, to see and experience new things. But the more I travel the more I question what it is about the Road that romances me: the novelty and adventure, or the simplicity?
When you're travelling, your world comes down to a microcosm of the present moment, the present surrounding, your current day, that particular adventure. It's very liberating not to worry about the past or the future to nearly the extent we normally do.
Your possessions are simplified to what you brought and what you've bought. All you have is in one place, in one suitcase if you're a seasoned traveller who's learned from past mistakes and aching shoulders. So why can't we live like that, or more like that, all the time?
One of the attractions of the iLife is that it's a lifestyle based on the simplicty of travelling: minimal possessions, because entertainment is virtual, minimal logistical issues because everything is digital, online, cloud-based. It's a gypsy freedom that still has all the mod-cons and comforts of home, as conferred by technology (and trust therein. Which is the bit I lack. But I'm working on it).

One Suitcase Rule

So I went away for two weeks, on a road trip that required careful  packing: balancing legal requirements and necessary gear with clothes,  cameras and cosmetics.
I tried to plan my packing carefully, therefore, instead of my usual last minute chucking in of anything clean that doesn't need ironing. This time I did internet research on packing lists and tips, and found a wealth of information and conflicting advice for every conceivable type of journey. There are websites that make checklists for you, based on who you are, where you're going, how you're travelling and what you plan to do when you get there. You can - and I did - distract yourself for hours with these online gadgets. I looked at long range weather forecasts and histories for the areas I was travelling through, and thought and agonized and thought and agonized for days until I had what I thought was the most pared down list possible.
Turns out I still packed far more than I needed. I could have got my three bags down to one, even given the bulkiness of my waterproofs. All of which makes me wonder why we think we need more stuff than we actually do. Why do we have such an inaccurate sense of what we can and can't do without? Contingency packing is all very well, but it's all in the odds. Maybe I'm just not good at judging them.

modern complications

What is it with our modern, urban, monetary world and the seemingly unavoidable generation of red tape?

I’m trying to organise going travelling in the EU. I have an EU passport, so this shouldn’t be complicated. After all, I have no visa applications to contend with.

But as I’m planning to take a road trip, the red tape has not only mutliplied, it’s formed itself into myriad hoops. The vehicle must be documented, serviced, taxed, insured for every country I may pass through, and I need vignettes for about half the countries on the trip as well. The vehicle just about needs its own passport, given the documentation I have to take – originals and copies.

And it needs its own little kit of spares and tools and items “just in case.”

You’d think it would be simple. It sounds simple – ride from here to there and back again. No hire companies or third parties involved, so how complicated can it be?

There’s the logistics, of course. It would be so easy just to let the road take me where it will, and just ad lib the food and shelter. No go. At various points, accommodation must be pre-booked, pre-authorised, pre-paid and re-confirmed with a mile-long email chain I must (naturally) print and take with me.

The more we correspond instantly, globally and effectively, it seems, the more of a papertrail we generate. The forests must be petrified, watching our merry paper-fuelled antics.

I’ll be surprised if I have any space for clothes once I’ve packed all the documentation and legally required information and extras. I bought pocket-sized phrase books to help me out (and prevent the kind of unwitting offence I’m otherwise likely to cause), but at this rate they’ll stay home because it’ll be them or underwear.

zen and the art of motorcycle loading

I’m going on a road trip, or at least I’m trying to. Packing for it is proving entertaining. On a motorbike, there is limited packing room, and the EU insists everyone carries a long (and quite bulky) list of equipment, mostly just in case something goes wrong. I mentioned all this last week.

So I’ve made the list of what I need to take, and tried to pack it into my luggage. It doesn’t fit. That is, it fits, but then the zips don’t close. The trouble with biking is that you can’t simply just change bags.

So I’ve unpacked it all and tried to decide what isn’t so essential. The art of Zen and minimalism are seriously coming into their own here. If only I were any good at them.

Of course, I need to think about how likely I am to need stuff urgently (like my waterproofs in a downpour on an autobahn at 100mph) and how delicate it is (like my camera in a downpour on an autobahn – you get the gist) and also how much everything weighs because weight distribution is a far bigger factor on two wheels than on four.

I’m not that precious – I don’t need a hairdryer, an iron or other such luxuries. Okay, I’m not mad about wearing the same shirt for days on end, but I think of that as socially acceptable, not precious.

The trouble is that biking comes with a massive pile of gear at the best of times, and holidays do as well. Combining the two into one relatively cabin-sized bag isn’t nearly as easy as I’d hoped.

So I’m trying the much vaunted tip of living with piles of stuff for a day and then cutting it down to half, rinse and repeat. Eventually, the essentials will be left, apparently.

I’m trying all the methods of packing and all the cool online packing-list tools (http://www.independenttraveler.com/packing). In the end, as long as it all fits in the bag, that’s all I need.

Objects in the rosy rear-view may appear other than they were

We tend to look back to the past as being somehow simple and golden. Or at least rose-tinted. The facts are far more pragmatic. When we look back to a simple golden bygone age of peace and harmony, we’re looking at a myth. Harmony is what you get when you run out of other options.

People lived simply because they didn’t have much – they couldn’t afford it. They had one set of clothes because clothes were expensive, making them time-consuming. They made do and mended everything because it was cheaper than replacement. They looked after their few possessions because the cost of replacement was prohibitvely high. Sunday best wasn’t just an expression, it was the one set of clothes you kept for holy days – for the day of rest, and the rest of the time, you wore the same working clothes day in and day out. In medieval times, Europe would have stunk. Not purely because of a lack of sanitation but also because if you’re wearing your clothes all the time, you have no time to clean them.

We look to them as an inspiration for a simpler way of living, and forget they had no choice. They aspired to a more complicated way of life, with more possessions and more requisite skills and manners. It’s only human to aspire to the life of those in power, because they are the ones who are more likely to survive – they have the pick of the resources, after all.

It’s all very well to look back and sigh nostalgically, but we’re actually nostalgic for an illusion. The idea of deliberately simplifying and minimising is a relatively recent one – and its early proponents came from those who had, because it’s only when you have that you can speculate as to the benefits of not-having. The have-nots are just trying to make ends meet and don’t have time for such patently stupid questions.

I’m all for living lightly and simply, but I don’t want to kid myself that it’s really a time-hallowed life philosophy. Which means it’s all still pretty experimental and there are no glib answers.

INSTANT TIDYING

So my parents came to stay the other weekend. I live in a shoebox. This was always going to be fun, so in a special effort to make it less fraught, I had a whirlwind declutter before they arrived (yes, in some cases just moving things to where they’d be unlikely to upset/ be discovered by my mother). This clear-out wasn’t about throwing stuff away, but about temporarily making more space. I needed to clear the surfaces, a dawer or two, and make space for their suitcases and the camp bed.

As a rule of thumb, the more visible clutter is, the more frustrating it is. So it pays to clear off the most visible spots first: the kitchen counter, the table, the desk. My lovely wide windowsills that serve as shelving. Thank fully, I have amassed (unintentionally) something of a collection of bags-for-life into which everything got shoved and moved to the store-cupboard. In my shoebox of a flat, I also use the area under chairs as storage, and that needed to be cleared as well, because it looks so untidy

In the kitchen, I am halfway toward my ideal recipe collection in that I keep everything in a plastic wallet . Ultimately, I want everything on catalogue cards and laminated (look, I’m not the tidiest cook, OK?)

All books, magazines, DVDs etc got put in pretty-looking cheap woven boxes and hidden on top of the wardrobe – I can still get at them but they’re unobtrusive. And frankly, not much else is going to fit up there – it’s a tall wardrobe.

The net result was just enough space for 3 people plus luggage without having to hold our breaths, and it took me less than 20 minutes after they left to get everything back to usual – including all the bags from the store-cupboard. Okay – not back to usual. Back to a very neat and tidy usual.

IDIOTS GUIDE TO ONLINE TRADING

I need to sell a motorcycle, and I want to use the web. So far, so good. But online selling, especially auction selling, is a minefield of compliex computer-ese and jargon and every time I venture into the quagmire, I’m to my eyebrows in acronyms in 5 seconds flat. So, in the interests of keeping things simple, I have compiled the following translation of the instructions:

Weird terms:
FVF - Final Value Fee
TOS - Terms of Service
Then there are the obvious generics for selling items online:

 - Contact details!! I know it’s obvious, but you need to be careful. I’ve submitted an ad and forgotten to put my details in the body text, with the result that on that website, they weren’t included in the ad. Somewhat pointless.

 - Photos (copy and paste free thumbnails via an online album service if you can find a free one. This gets around any picture fees)

 - Specific and detailed and honest description (especially for vehicles),

 - There are tricks for cutting down the fees, too. Every site you can list on has a way of charging you for the privilege – even the free ones. Usually, the charge is for a priority – top of screen – listing. They’re often not worth it. For instance – CAPS are free where bold is chargeable. On eBay, picking the right starting price instead of a reserve can help as they charge an extra fee for a reserve price, so it can often be cheaper to use a starting price instead. And gallery listing is recommended as a cheap “priority” option.

 - Timing is everything, as always – you need to think about when your likely buyers are likely to be browsing the web, and (for big ticket items like my bike) when they’ll next get paid. And you also need to think about when the forum you’re selling on is likley to have gremlins, high traffic or maintenance – because that’s the most likely time for your ad to get lost in some virtual black hole (but your fee will still be processed).

 - And talking of fees – it’s worth reading all the T&C small print for any site or method of payment you use, because they will hit you for yet more fees (caveat emptor has become caveat auctor, to a large extent).

 - Delivery methods are another potentially horrible cost, so use sites like www.parcel2go.com, but for my purposes, it’s irrelevant, because it will be collection only – and you pay me before you get the keys. After all, if you don’t I will simply report the bike stolen…

Spartan Consumption

Ancient Sparta, as envisaged by Lycurgus, is a foreign concept to the modern world. It seems so unnecessarily harsh and draconian, with its emphasis on physical endurance and militarism. But it was also egalitarian – it enforced equality on its citizens (citizens, okay, not helots, perioikoi or mothakes) by means of strict discipline and an emphasis on conspicuous non-consumption.

To be frank, Sparta was a foreign concept to its contemporaries as well. Athens, with its newly fledged democracy, and material society where wealth and power were inextricably linked, found Sparta almost barbaric.

Which begs the question, given that ulitmately Sparta fell and Athens did not, whether materialism is somehow inherent to humans, and whether minimalism is, in fact, possible.

Spartan culture did not place a high value on personal comfort or material riches. If you were powerful, you had land, which was given to you firstly as a citizen, and secondly as a reward for valour in battle – that is, service to the State. The State was the be all and end all, and it ensured everyone had what they needed to survive, but no more. At least, not where anyone could see.

And perhaps that’s what made the whole, ascetic edifice fall – daily bread and black soup, iron bars as currency – the simple fact that what a citizen was officially allowed wasn’t comfortable or tasty. So when, after the defeat of Athens, Spartans were exposed to all these luxuries, they rapidly acquired a taste for a softer life (at least behind closed doors).

But Sparta fell, in the end, not because it enforced egalitarian poverty on all, but because it was too rigidly disciplined to cope with a changing world and the changing views of its own citizens, and Athens survived because it was more flexible.

As much as it’s human to want to be the fittest/ fattest in order to survive, we have and right now, given the state of the global environment, we urgently need, the capacity to rethink the values we place on material wealth as opposed to happiness (an unnatural state, never achieved from the outside in, as we all reluctantly know).

Cash Poor

The distinct difficulty I have as a typically time-poor urbanite is that I am not as cash-rich as the articles tell me I should be every time they flag up yet another way to simplify and save time by delegating or automating parts of my life. I’d love to be able to delegate all the boring bits, but I can’t afford it.

Part of trying to simplify my life is that I’d like to stop wasting money on things that are neither useful nor necessary nor beautiful. I’m doing this in the quite possibly unfounded hope that it will diminish the panic I invariably feel at the end of a contract, before I have another one lined up. (There are times when I hate being freelance).

Most ways to save money seem to involve sacrificing time, and vice versa. This is NOT helping. So are there any simple ways around the problem?

Making my own lunch to take to work isn’t all that time-consuming – as I don’t generally wear make-up (cycling to work renders it pointless), I can afford the 5 minutes. It’s cheaper and simpler than spending ages staring at the shelves in the sandwich shop going “um…” Given the amount of mayo in the average sandwich shop offering, it’s probably healthier too.

A common money-saving tip is to shop around. Timewise, all I can say is thank God for price comparison sites.

I’ve started using a top sheet under my duvet. This may seem completely unnecessary but it means I can launder less often, because I only have to change the sheets on a weekly, not the whole bed. And sheets are a lot less bulky to wash, saving time and money at the laundrette (a major plus given the price rises at my local laundromats).

Of course, the first tip they give you for saving money is Budget: write one and stick to it. Um. And spend exactly how much time tracking my expenditure? I do this as part of my job, so I know how time consuming it can be to do it properly.

But the truth is, if you do it in a spreadsheet program, you don’t need to be an IT or maths genius to set up the formulas. And once those are in, it will pretty much do itself as long as you enter the outgoings. I’ve simplified these so all cash transactions fall under “ATM” and then I don’t need to track every last cappuccino. Then it takes 5 minutes a day, if that, and at the end of the month, all I need to do is clear one column and hey presto – it’s reset itself.

TIME POOR OR TIME COMPLICATED?

There are 24 hours in a day. If I sleep for 8, as per average recommendations, and work for 8, and commute for 30 minutes each way, I then have 24-17=7 hours left in which to do everything else: cook, eat, clean, socialise, relax, shop, exercise… It seems doable. On paper it seems very practical, but the problem is that we cannot consolidate our schedules in practice the way we consolidate them when listing our activities for the day.

We’re used to this – life in the big city has been time-poor and cash rich for many years, according to the lifestyle articles in newspapers and magazines. And while I’ve always been time-poor, I wonder about the extent to which most of us are cash rich. Life in the big city is busy and expensive, and it seems there is nothing we can do about that – to save time, or rather, to free it up for other things, we can buy services from other people to clean, cook, shop, launder, plan – you name it, just about.  The rise of jobs like the VA (Virtual Assistant) was inconceivable even ten years ago – the technology that enables it wasn’t available. We try to cram everything into the 67 hours a week we have spare (this assumes 16 hours of sleep over the weekend and a 5 day/ 40 hour working week. Most of us have a lot less free time than this, which only makes it harder). And the sordid truth is that the less cash you have, the less time you have, because you can’t afford the services that would help free up your time. We’re so busy we’re constantly playing catch up with our own breath. So is there a simple way to free up more time (without cutting back working hours)?

We can cut back on wasted time by making our commute more useful (reading, studying, walking or cycling).

We can try to see friends over lunch – although most of us already use lunch to run errands and eat at our desks

The trouble with all of these options is that they require us to multi-task, and that seems to contradict simplifying. And I have to wonder about the quality of the time and attention each task then gets – after all, one of the things I love so much about biking is that concentration has to be absolute – you can’t split your attention because you will come off. And that hurts.

So multi-tasking aside, what can we do?We can restrict our digital lives to reasonable amounts. What did we do before smart phones and broadband, other than stick to plans and consolidate our correspondence to one chunk of time?

This is what I’m trying to do, and so far it seems to be working out. I’ll keep you posted.

Zen and the Art of Minimalism

Minimalism is often confused, in the Western mind, with Zen Buddhism. I’ve done this myself, so I sought some kind of clarity.

After a few hours of research all over the web, I came up with this: Zen appears to have merged from the meeting of Taoism and Buddhism in China, and thence migrated to Japan.

The principle distinction of Zen from other forms of Buddhism is not about simplicity or minimalism – it’s the idea that there can be a "special transmission outside scriptures, not founded on words or letters" through which nirvana can be reached. So Zen is about means of spiritual enlightenment, not about a lack of material possessions.

Not to say it advocates materialism – few faiths do, because the whole purpose of faith is to lend weight to the non-material, gravitas and importance to the invisible and the intangible. Like all Buddhist paths, it advocates a focus on the spirit and the goal of spiritual transcendence from the physical, material cycle of reincarnations.

Minimalism is a term born out the arts world – it came from movements in the visual arts. So how the heck did the two get so tangled up together?

Japan has always intrgued the western world with its simplicity of execution and of conception – the traditional design of a Japanese house, the traditional menu and the disciplined (deceptive) simplicity of the haiku – these all appear to the west to advocate simplicity, and it’s easier for the west to ignore the fact that the peasants of any culutre tend to live and eat simply because they have no choice or resources to do otherwise.

Buddhists, too, tend to live simply – they are trying to free themselves of the distractions of the material world in order to achieve transcendence, nirvana.

But this is a spiritual choice, and a lifestyle, not an artistic expression. Minimalism has become a catch all term for the idea of simple, clean lines and a Spartan aesthetic. It doesn’t have anything to do with Zen Buddhism, except in cases of popular ignorance.

My subscription to Zen Habits (http://zenhabits.net/) aside, this is not about Zen – I am not seeking nirvana, nor am I a Buddhist. This is about creating a simpler, more disciplined, more Spartan aesthetic for my life in the midst of one of the world’s most complex environments – a sprawling, bustling capital city.

SPRING CLEANING

Spring has sprung, the grass has risen and the clocks have changed.  The light is stronger every day, which means I can now see all the dust and debris of the winter. I’m absolutely certain this is where the whole idea of spring-cleaning comes from – there is light and warmth enough to go outside and do the damn washing that’s been mounting up over the cold dark winter fo smoky fires and multiple blankets.

Yes, we don’t (thank God) live like that anymore in the urban west, but I think it’s the root of the concept.

In the spirit of tradition, therefore, I am doing some spring-cleaning. I have ruthlessly (well – relatively) cleared out my wardrobe of clothes I don’t wear, donated to charity a load of books I won’t re-read, and I am now contemplating eBay as a way to get rid of the bigger ticket junk that is preventing me from reaching my filing system (literally. It’s in front of it, because that’s the only place it fits) and which I only still possess because it was expensive and has a resale value – I hope.

The trouble with clearing out and decluttering, I have discovered anew, is that when the shelves are clear, you can’t pretend not to see the dust. And boy, oh boy, is London ever a dusty old town. I clean and sweep and two days later – dustballs the size of tumbleweed are rolling insolently across the floor any time the breeze blows in.

I have still to clear out my desk of pens that don’t work and ancient post-its to self, but that will need courage in the face of my stationery addiction. I know. What can I say? I prefer stationery suppliers to fashion stores (they don’t involve fitting rooms).

But I am also determined that this year, this season, I will manage to clear out the rest of my life. After all, why should the seasonal revamp stop with my living space? I’ve been trying – not overly successfully – to do this all year, but with the longer days and nicer weather, I am running out of excuses.

The aim of this blog is to help me focus on editing my life – and that’s editing in the film sense, not the journalist one. In film, unlike writing, it’s not about rewrites/reshoots. In film, you do NOT want to have to do “pick ups” – they’re expensive, time-consuming to set up, a nightmare for continuity and a general migraine for production - which is why you always shoot too much in the first place.

I want to try to leave as much as possible on the cutting room floor without compromising “the film” – a lot of what gets filmed for any show or movie is extraneous, is there to cover the angles and to give the edit options, in case another shot doesn’t work or doesn’t cut smoothly. The editor decides which shots to use to tell the story as fully and eloquently as possible within the time allowed. Everything else ends up – well, these days, deleted or boxed up in archive. And thus, the audience sees the finished, polished, fluent version, in which every scene and every shot adds to the arc of the narrative. I would like my life to be that ordered, to feel that organised and purposeful. I know it never will because it’s life and has no neat and tidy narrative, but if life really is only what we make it, why can’t I write my own?