Liberat.es
Making space for a new norm
I’ve cluttered things up a bit. This morning, I counted six books on my coffee table. It’s not that there were six books that is the issue - it’s that I’m currently in various states of reading each of those books. That’s a lot of books. And there’s more. I’m in the middle of two audio courses. One of them is an ongoing course that started in November. The second is one I downloaded a couple of years ago, and decided (for some bloody reason) to start listening to this past weekend. Cause, you know, I had nothing else to do. But wait! More? More! I regularly listen to 5-6 podcasts a week. These podcasts are anywhere from 40 minutes to about an hour and a half!!!
Ok. Do some math, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist1 to see that I’ve overburdened myself with information for my mind to process, and to take up my attention. No wonder I’ve struggled a bit with time…and with attention!
Sitting there this morning, looking at that pile of books, I made a decision: scale back. Slow down. There’s really no need for me to take in all of that information. I made breakfast in silence (I’ll often listen to a news podcast). I ate breakfast in silence. I did chores in silence. I’m going to be hoping in my car in about 10 minutes - and I’m going to drive in silence.
This cluttering is the new norm, I think. And I’d say a lot of folks have decided it’s not really serving. The popularity of Marie Kondo’s show not so subtly points to this. Perhaps we can all start to move in a direction where space is the new norm. What might that look like for us?
I’m not really sure why we use “rocket scientist” as our go-to smart people. Like, is it really in the scope of work they do? To crunch numbers on how people spend time? I suspect they spend more time trying to, I don’t know, keep rockets from blowing up.↩