How I Simplified My Life

The title should be extended with "and how my life is still a bucket of chaos." This photo was taken outside a movie theater in Waterville, Maine in July 2005. (I know this because I organize the raw images I download from my camera by month. This simplifies my life. Of course, the fact that I almost never bother to properly label these images helps with the chaos part. I do try to give them better names when I edit them for the blogs.) The picture shows a large model of a building made from wine corks.

I think this will be a little ongoing theme for my blog during Holidailies. What has worked in making my life simpler. And evidence that entropy outruns my best efforts in the same realms.

It is a fertile area: this battle with simplicity and chaos. Simplicity is good for the soul. Chaos feeds the mind.

There is the matter of journals. I still use paper journals but I try to copy them to the computer and (even though I know better) consider that they are saved for posterity. This effort is Sisyphean to say the least. But I have actually discarded some little spiral bound notebooks and they are gone to the landfill instead of taking up space here.

Then there is the newspaper pile. I have developed a method for sorting through a pile of papers quickly. If it's a strictly business section I give the headlines a glance. Charts of stock prices and graphs are ignored. I get that online. If it's a Sports Section, I discard it immediately unless we are in the midst of a Grand Slam Tennis event when I might look at articles about tennis. But usually I get the Grand Slams online through a wonderful portal with draws and real time scores and more. I have more trouble discarding sections about Art and Leisure and Technology and Science. My best efforts at controlling piles of newsprint are simply inundated by two papers that come daily, one six days a week and a few weeklies. We won't even talk about magazines and especially the deluge of New Yorkers arriving fifty times a year. Let's just say that one in my bathroom is a 2005 issue.

And technology. I've greatly simplified my life by delaying technology acquisition. Because as much as that new (printer/computer/camera/phone/GPS receiver/scanner/external hard drive/DVD player/TV/video console/whatever) will enhance your life, it will also suck away your time testing and programming and hooking up and such. Even though it's fun to own your favorite music CD or movie on DVD, there is that matter of storage. So I resist buying technology and media. I will eventually succumb but hopefully less of my time is wasted in the interim. Sadly, I often buy technology for others, especially my nieces, and then find myself testing the item before I send it to them.

I want a simple existence where everything is useful and has its place and I want to live in a reasonable amount of space. But it has to be complicated enough to be interesting, too. In this vein I continue with downsizing and organizing and divesting. Knowing that it will never really happen.

And did I mention that I have a drawer full of wine corks in the kitchen? Hence the relevance of this photo. See I'm making sense here. Aren't I?