Keep it Simple, Smarty

I have several fruit trees in my yard that I just completed pruning.  When I finished, it looked like there were as many branches on the ground as left on the tree.  Here in Southern California, my peaches are already blossoming and forming baby peaches.  Soon will come the heart-rendering job of thinning.  It just kills me to pull six baby peaches off a branch to throw away, leaving only three to grow.  

The only reason I do it is because I know that if I leave all of them on, I’ll have many tiny inferior peaches.  If I thin, I’ll have large, beautiful, more flavorful fruit.

We live in a time when we and our children can do more, have more, see more, accumulate more, and want more than any time we have ever known.  Too often we allow ourselves and our children to be driven from one deadline, activity, or opportunity to the next.  We are busily engaged in a multitude of trivial things that distract us from the few vital things that make all of the difference.  Maybe we need to do a little judicial pruning and thinning in our lives.

One of my daughters, who works as a personal organizer, visited me and helped me declutter and organize my garage.  While we worked, she taught me.  She said, “A popular decluttering book tells people to pick up each item they own and ask the question, ‘does this spark joy?’ and then let it go if it doesn’t.”  She doesn’t agree with this advice.

Does my toilet brush spark joy?  No, more like disgust.  But I’m not going to let it go because having a dirty toilet would be more disgusting.  There are things you keep because they are useful. 

The bigger problem with using the ‘spark joy’ approach is the mindset it supports. 

1) We place our own happiness above everything else and continue to define our happiness in terms of our possessions.

2) It does not help us overcome the pull of consumption in our lives.  Owning less is great, but wanting less is even better.

3) It does little to evaluate the motivations within that caused the clutter to build in the first place, so it just comes back.

My daughter proposes an alternative question she read in an article by Joshua Becker.  “Does it help me fulfill a greater purpose with my life?  …whatever [people] feel they were put on the planet to do, some of their possessions (or time, I might add) are either directly or indirectly helping them accomplish it, while others are holding them back.  It makes the best sense to keep what aligns with their goal in life and get rid of the rest.”

Sometimes we clutter our time like we clutter our homes.

I am sort of a jack of all trades.  I have been blessed with many interests and abilities.  I love to write, to paint, to compose music, to garden, to serve, to play the piano, to sing, to study, to research.  I am adequate in all of them, but not really good in any of them.  Why?  Because none of them are my ultimate aim.  I cannot be all things, and must choose where to spend my time and efforts.  My aim is to be a good mother, to raise productive, independent, caring, hard working children.  It is to be a good wife and treat my husband with love and respect and care.  It is to be a good person, serving those around me, being honest, keeping my word, being full of love instead of judgement.

I have taken classes and read to develop each of my interests, but not to the point of excelling.  I use them to serve others (playing the piano for the children in church, writing this blog to help younger mothers, sharing the bounty of my garden with my neighbors) and for my own enjoyment.  But they are not the dominant use of my time or energies.

So how should we be spending our time?  Maybe for some, becoming an outstanding artist is a central goal.  Maybe another yearns to be a concert pianist.  We need to identify our goals and then head in that direction.  What things are we doing with our time now that move us closer to our ultimate aim, and what things are getting in the way?  Could we use our time, money, and energy in better ways?  It would be a good idea for us to identify our main goal in life.  If we don’t know what the goal is, we don’t know what is most important to us and we fritter and clutter away our lives.

One year I was the room mother for one of my children’s grade school classes.  For a winter party, I made 32 felt ice skates with candy cane blades for the children.  It took hours and hours.  They were really cute, but--the only ones impressed were the other mothers, who were probably feeling intimidated because they didn't spend hours and hours on what they brought.  The kids didn't care one bit.  Being Southern Californians, they didn’t know what ice skates were.  The felt skates ended up on the floor or in the trash as the children ate the candy canes that they  would have been happy to have just plain.  

I clearly cluttered my life needlessly.

My daughter takes us back to the question of the toilet brush.  “In our lives,” she said, “we have things that we have to do that may not seem to be part of our true purpose.  We have maintenance tasks.  We have to sleep, we have to eat, we have to maintain our homes, we have to manage our money, exercise, shower, wash our children’s faces and behinds.  These things can be very time consuming but they are necessary.  We need to do them.  But it becomes a matter of balance.  If we let the maintenance tasks get out of balance in our priorities, they can obscure what we’re really trying to achieve.  Then, perhaps, we end up with things like a perfect Thanksgiving meal but high tensions among family members.  Or being on time to church with perfectly groomed children who resent being there.  Or such tightly controlled spending of our time and resources that we are unwilling to share our time or money to meet the needs of others.

Housekeeping has never been one of my interests or talents.  My dad told me that my room was like the layers in a geological formation.  He could tell what I’d done all week by delving into the layers of clothes on my floor.  

I “won” the pigpen award in my college dorm.  Years later, I hadn’t reformed.  A child of 10, coming to our house to play with my children, primly told me, “Your house is very messy.”  So at one point in time, I decided I was going to have a perfectly clean house all the time.  It was hard for me, but I was doing it, until I realized that I didn’t want to let my children make cookies in the kitchen, or do a craft project at the dining table, or play in the rain, or have friends over, or play dress-up, or build a fort of couch cushions and sheets, or many other things, because if they did it, they would make a mess, and the house wouldn’t be clean.  While I definitely needed to keep better control over the mess and clutter, I overbalanced my clean control and lost my aim.  As one dad said when someone commented on the worn spots his children had made playing on his lawn, “I’m raising children, not grass.”

Sometimes, when things go wrong, when we are under stress or duress, we think we need to work harder, accelerate our frantic pace, run even faster and do more to get through to the other side.  Pres. Deiter Uchtdorf, a former airline pilot, talked about what pilots do when they encounter turbulence. 

“A student pilot,” he said, “may think that increasing speed is a good strategy because it will get them through the turbulence faster.  But that may be the wrong thing to do.  Professional pilots understand that there is an optimum turbulence penetration speed that will minimize the negative effects of turbulence.  And most of the time that would mean to reduce your speed.  It’s the same principle that applies to speed bumps on a road.

“Therefore, it is good advice to slow down a little, steady the course, and focus on the essentials when experiencing adverse conditions.  When stress levels rise, when distress appears, when tragedy strikes, going faster and harder doesn’t ease the way.

“When we unnecessarily complicate our lives, we often feel increased frustration, diminished joy, and too little sense of meaning in our lives.  Instead we need to focus on what matters most.

“There is a beauty and clarity that comes from simplicity that we sometimes do not appreciate in our thirst for intricate solutions.  ...we would do well to slow down a little, proceed at the optimum speed for our circumstances, focus on the significant, lift up our eyes, and truly see the things that matter most.”

Once we have pondered, prayed, and decided which of the many things we’ve cluttered our life with need to be pruned out, it is yet another challenge to make it happen.  We need to need to think about which habits we should work on to make the worthwhile things become more automatic, more prominent.  Just like cleaning and organizing my garage will take constant effort to keep it from becoming filled with unimportant things again, it is daily efforts applied consistently over time that will keep our lives focused on the important and eliminate what is merely filling our time and lessening our strengths.

In my next blog in two weeks, I’ll share some practical hints and ideas in simplifying our children’s lives, which in turn will simplify ours.  Until then, find your joy.

     photo by shinosan