As I have stated before, a minimalist life is a life of intention. A life where every moment of every day is a moment that adds value to our life.
Let this not suggest however that every minute of every day must be dedicated toward some goal. That we must be constantly working to meet some ends that we have defined as success. Nothing can be further from the truth.
What it means is that we should be planning out our time, and not end up being incidentally idle. It means that we analyzed our wants and needs, and have determined the things and activities we require in our lives to satisfy those wants/needs. It means that we have scheduled our time and space according to this determination.
This may include TV time with the family (building relationships), video game time (entertainment and mental exercise), or social media time (information). It is up to the individual and the individual alone to determine what adds value to their life and what is just time “filler.” I would ask only that we be honest with ourselves in determining this.
In a grand effort to live this life of intention, we could book our selves solid. Every minute of every day booked with more events and activities. So much so that we are in a rush to make it to everything. We pack as much “value” in one day as possible. To this, I say “Wooooh woooooh, slow down!” In the effort to get as much value out of our day as possible, we actually risk losing a whole bunch of value.
How do we lose value?:
- We are in such a rush, we can’t live in the moment.
- We are so focused on the day “plan”, that we miss other opportunities for value in our peripheral scope.
- We don’t learn anything. Knowledge rushed, knowledge forced, is not knowledge retained.
- We are likely to miss some planned events anyway. We simply can’t book events/activities back to back. Some will go into overtime, thereby making us late for others. A nice comfortable time buffer is necessary.
“The more we tighten our grip, the more will slip through our fingers”
So we must slow down, allow for some time buffer between our valuable activities and events. It is a good effort to pack as much “valued” activities in a day as possible, but we aren’t going to get any value from these activities if we don’t quiet the body and mind.