Thoreau inspired me

Still we live meanly like ants;…it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail….. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!.... In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. P.61. Google books http://books.google.com/books?id=wMDVLVduRdAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false)

 
There aren’t many things in my life that have had as well defined and long lasting effect as Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. Judging, using one modern metric, from the difficulty of securing a blog using “simplifysimplify” or “simplicitysimplicitysimplicity” I am not alone.
When I read this passage in particular (about 15+ years ago), I had the rare, sought after but never found while seeking, sensation of the floor falling away, the clouds in my head clearing, the birds chirping, and the universe aligning. It branded itself into my mind instantly and never faded. And I’m someone who is terrible about remembering quotes, conversations, movies, or mystery plots. I quoted and discussed it incessantly, I gave gifts with the key phrases emblazoned on them, I wrote it places for self reminders, and it comes up for me again and again and again and is applicable to so many things; possessions, habits, relationships, routines, spending, patterns of thinking and behavior, conversations, actions. Did I miss anything? And I again think I’m not alone in realizing that we humans need simplicity yet tend to complicate, and are complicated.

So, that is going to be what I work on in this weblog, is these things that come up daily or show up as overall themes that benefit from a reminder to simplify.

What about you, (dear Reader, *ha!* couldn’t resist!)? What do you think about the passage, and how it applies to, or has applied to, your life? Or our society? What have you read or seen or heard that had a profound impact on you, that you carry with you? What universal truths have you uncovered and applied?

Inbox and select Folders

Someday I hope to keep my email inbox to one page or less, I think that's about 25 emails. I think I have a handful of weeks when that happened. Here is my dilemma. I have a few minutes where I want to clear my head, or the kids allow me, or I steal from my sleep allowance. I have time to read, but not think through a response, or just think it through. I leave the email in the inbox, hoping that I will have time to deal with it later. Since later is inevitably the same as the time in which I checked, the email sits.

Sometimes I file them, thinking that I can look at them later if I want to but I usually don't, I've forgotten they existed. I have many folders optimistically waiting to help me organize and clarify. They help me organize and possibly clarify, but definitely do not help me do anything else with them, e.g. take action, respond, etc. I even have a "Needs Attention" folder, which I'm afraid to look in.

Yesterday and today I felt this frantic urge to clear things out when I opened my email and saw all these Things that I should have done something with or about. My approach was disjointed, tackle a few in the inbox that might still be relevant or meaningful, and a few old ones that I hadn't looked at in possibly years, in the folders. I'd missed the boat on many (of the 126) in the inbox, but was able to respond to a couple and delete some, and get the inbox total to 65.

The folders were interesting, I suppose. I went through 2 of them, one was called "online reciepts" and the other was a folder with project information for an interesting and very involved project in college. Both brought up emotions, which is probably why I avoid weeding through these things, I don't really feel I have time to reflect and process feelings. Much easier it seems to avoid them or stuff them down.

I'd forgotten so much of what was in there. For the online receipts I wondered if I'd ever received some of the stuff I'd paid for, I remembered neither buying nor receiving some things. For the project, I wondered how I'd ever kept track of so much going on when nowadays I can hardly get together a grocery list, or remember what's happening on the weekend. I read emails that I wouldn't have recognized as mine if I were shown them by someone else. I also wondered if I'd really been managing all my responsibility well at that time; maybe that's why some people from that time don't keep in touch. *sigh*

There's a quote from Maya Angelou that I can't find exactly, but it goes something like this: if I'd known better I would have done better, and when I knew better, I did.

How do others manage things like emails, doing and keeping track of what they ask of you, and remembering?

First Post - what was simplified today

Today's simplification was the title of my new blog. I started out checking with wordpress but was irritated to find that the title I wanted had been deleted but would never be available to me, and the titles there cannot have anything but letters and numbers. The practice of ruling out forever blog titles that have been deleted does not make much sense to me, even after reading the explanation. It ensures future creation of these unattractive, inelegant titles mixing letters and numbers that mean something obscure to the creator but don't hold anything for the reader. But clearly I have much to learn about blogging rules.

Since I didn't really want "simplify1simplify5" and just don't have the creativity to come up with a catchy way to work numbers into the "simplifysimplify" that I really wanted, or actually, "simplify, simplify!" I trotted over to Blogger and found that I could do "simplify---simplify" which works well enough for me.