Less | My Branches Need Pruning Again | AKA: Do I Ever Learn My Lesson?

Less is my word of the year and it has been a thought-provoking and exciting one. It is endlessly flexible and has so many facets that can be applied to my life. So far, I’ve written about how I’ve been focusing on less clutter, less spending, less waste. But one area of Less that’s been on my mind and I haven’t written about is how to embrace doing less and simply being. As Mosscap reminded Sibling Dex in A Prayer for the Wild-Built: “It’s okay to just LIVE.”

I wrote about pruning my branches last March. It was inspired by this paragraph:

“When a Japanese gardener “prunes open,” Marsha explained, he or she cuts away not only dead branches and foliage, but also often a number of perfectly healthy branches that detract from the beauty inherent in the tree’s essential structure. Pruning open allows the visitor to see up, out, and beyond the trees to the sky, creating a sense of spaciousness and letting light into the garden. It also enables an individual tree to flourish by removing complicating elements, simplifying structure, and revealing its essence. The process of pruning open turns the tree inside out, so to speak, revealing the beautiful design inherent within it.” – Pruning Open The True Self

The idea is simple and will be familiar if you’ve read 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: no one can do everything they want and you have to pick what’s most important to you and stick to it. Sometimes that means pruning away things that you really love.

This time last year, like so many of us, I was trying to do a million things at the same time. With last year’s pruning, I cut away almost all of my stitching other than knitting. That worked really well for a long time until I started slowly adding different types of stitching into my life. I began to think that I had things under control and couldn’t imagine how a little bit of quilting could hurt. And then obsession strikes. I’m ignoring other tasks that I consider non-negotiable, like exercise and daily cooking, so that I can find a little “extra time” to work on my current obsession.

But the real challenge for me is that I just want things to be simple. I don’t want to have thirty works in progress begging for my attention everyday. It’s almost like I can hear them constantly reminding me that they’re unfinished; there’s a little part of my brain that doesn’t shut off when something is being ignored. I’d like to give my brain margin and ensure that I’m not rushing from task to task without ever stopping to look around at what’s actually happening around me. Much like with my physical environment, I want my brain to have space to breathe, for energy to flow. Right now it’s cluttered and stifled.

So like with any healthy plant, it’s time to prune the branches that have grown back. This week’s thinking and journaling task: identify what is essential. I’ve been reading the first section of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and it has asked me to decide “what I want to go big on.” A big part of me struggles with that question because that’s not necessarily what I’m looking for. I’m aiming to be content with this small and quiet life and that often means being happy with slow progress. But I’d like to make sure that I’m being gentle with myself and not setting myself up for the inevitable crash that I see on the horizon. Identifying the essential will help get me beyond this hurdle.

I’m sure to long time readers that I sound like a broken record. And still — I can’t be the only person out in blogland who struggles to find her purpose, her ideal; who is slow to realize that life is happening right now and that it doesn’t have to be filled to the brim with the meaningless. The meaningful won’t be created by ticking off to-do lists. It’s happening right now, whether or not I look up and notice it.