🐝 The Sting
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😎 🏝 Chillin’
Saturdays aren’t for working
Every Saturday I’ll bring you something different, just for fun.
I deep cleaned my house this week. It’s something I do once or twice a year. I call it the great uncluttering. Typically this is a multi day effort where I disassemble all the endless islands of junk that have turned themselves into unquestioned tradition; the endless collections of random items on flat surfaces everywhere. They start random but with time the shoulder height shelf next to the door becomes the place all rubber bands collect, or for some reason the fruit bowl in the kitchen moonlights as the haven for all lost pen caps.
You get the picture.
This clutter grows organically, creeping to cover every surface available, like a fungus. Little expressions of intentions, abandoned to take on living out their own.
Like that guitar I had out for the last 9 months, sure I would play it, soon.
Or the half finished puzzle lying out long enough to start gathering dust.
I somehow feel lighter in my recently decluttered environment, free to focus more easily without the weight of all the little collections bearing witness to unconsummated thoughts.
I think clutter extends to my screens and how I interact with them.
Plenty has been said about how our devices are engineered so we keep on pawing for one more pellet like little more than a rat in a maze.
The solutions, be they Luddite or virtue signaling, like owners of conspicuous dumb phones, often don’t recognize the underlying problem, clutter in its many forms with its attendant mental burden, this running the risk of merely applying a mildly effective, topical salve.
Clutter is the embodiment of going with the flow. It’s the result of the absence of intent. When it gets too much, it is intent that deconstructs it.
Simple.
When I think about my relationship with all things digital, I often devise complicated ways to manage my dependency: timing access, turning my screen to grey scale, to do lists.
When Spotify plays the same, if technically different, playlist for hours on end, the solution is playing a CD in my CD player. One that will stop when its finished forcing me to either accept the ensuing silence or actively choose what to list to next.
Simple intent.
When I feel empty having doom scrolled X for 45 minutes as my kids get read for school, often 5 days in a row, the solution isn’t to stoically sit on my hands, but to realize that I enjoy reading something with my coffee in the morning. That’s why I have a subscription to Country Highway, a long form magazine in newspaper form.
Simple, informed intent.
It’s for the same reason I want to put my computer on a side desk, so that it’s screen is not always before my face. It’s a way of reminding me that it’s a tool, instead of a perpetual FOMO machine.
🧘♂ Last Word.
Very Marie Kondo, I know.
Just Chillin’,