Subtraction

Simplifying your life is so difficult. Everything is pulling you to be more complex.

• Yvon Chouinard

As surely as an oak gains rings over time, we gain junk. Our junk may take the form of items, titles, roles, beliefs, stories, or nearly anything else. Much of life, we are taught, is about accumulation—degrees, certifications, clients, family, money, property, toys—and the more we accumulate the more we must accumulate to contain all that we have accumulated.

If we are lucky, at some point we realize that somewhere beneath the mountain of things, be they physical or mental, we lost track of something important and we go looking for ourselves, for something that is true. Simplifying our life is a task of subtraction or of un-becoming.

It is as if the oak were to shed it rings in search of the acorn.