Simplifying Life in 2022

Greetings and New Year Blessings

Swimming in the ocean, building dragon sandcastles and eating cold watermelons with new friends.  Dancing to bring in the new year and cooling off by the waterfall after a big tramp.  Camping under the stars and waking up to the Tuis.  Nothing planned in advance, everything an unfolding as a response to what was alive in the moment.

Doing very little, Being very relaxed.

I wondered – could I live this way every day? Even when the outer world is in chaos and there are the usual ‘financial security’ fears that guilt us into ‘doing more’?

In Being relaxed, in the space of letting go of trying to achieve anything, I came upon an intention that was tugging at me:

What if my life was so simple, I only did what I felt like doing?

Turns out it is a lot easier to live this way than we would like to imagine.  The problem is we carry so much ‘baggage’ around that gets in the way. The literal baggage in the form of material things or people and the metaphorical baggage in terms of our thoughts and beliefs. 

Can we start to sort out the things and the thoughts that match the lifestyle we are choosing to live?  Can we let go or transform all that is no longer matching our new lifestyle? This may mean letting go of relationships, friendships, things, jobs, etc. Nothing new here, we started to get used to letting go in 2020 and 2021, but this year the call is getting louder. It is time to live in alignment with your true intentions and the call to simplify is strong.

I’ll give you an example.  I gave up coffee 2 years ago – I have the occasional cup but more like once in a blue moon sort of thing.  My new lifestyle is more about nourishment and I find coffee very ungrounding for me. 

But even after two years, I still owned an espresso machine which sat on my kitchen bench looking quite cool.  It would have made sense for me to have sold it or given it away a long time ago yet there it was.

Then one blue-moon morning, I made myself a coffee, drank half of it and proceeded to put the machine up for sale online.  I didn’t think about it, I just did it.

But when someone bought it within 10 minutes, I felt a deep grief wash over me.

The reality of letting go of ‘things’ that have symbolized a certain luxury and meaning for me, but which are now no longer part of my lifestyle, turned out to be surprisingly traumatic.  Turns out there was a part of me that was not quite ready to let go of the old lifestyle, this baggage which included the glamour and status symbol that the espresso machine affords.

I was letting go of not just a thing but a part of an egoistic attachment to a way of life that had symbolized a certain status, a type of security grounded in material ownership. 

Simplifying my life would mean bringing full awareness to the part of me that also enjoys the complexities of material ownership - this process in itself is necessary. It includes supporting this part of me to feel seen and heard and integrated in my new lifestyle (more about that process in a future blog).

It’s good to simplify.

When we have brought full awareness and transformed this literal and metaphorical ‘baggage’, we are supporting our intention for this new lifestyle to become the reality.  For me, the intention is to live more simply.  And I know it will include grieving the ending of the old way of life.

Do you feel called to simplify? What would simplifying your life look like?

Photos by Ari Nedungat McBeath (#mrfancyguy)