egads and small fishes

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

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Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was a precedent-breaking First Lady during her husband’s (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) terms as U.S. President. She was a strong political helpmate who dedicated her life to Franklin’s purposes. And, unlike her predecessors, she held press conferences, traveled across the country, spoke and expressed her opinions candidly thereby transforming the role of First Lady.

Life is a great bundle of little things.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

By managing the little things we make more room for the bigger things - the things that give our life meaning. Tasks that follow us day in and day out can over-run us if we do not give them their own place so we can move away from that place quickly and efficiently.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) was one of the best regarded 19th century American poets even though he was a physician by profession. His poem Ironsides gave him national prominence and generated enough public sentiment that resulted in the historic frigate USS Constitution being preserved as a monument rather than be broken up for scrap.

Good change is the (occasionally) skilful redirecting, renewing, and reconnecting of stuff (like time, money, things, jokes, knowledge, hopes, passion, and dreams) into something better for us, for someone, even for everyone.
- Max McKeown

I’m ready for something better by making good changes in my life.

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Max McKeown has been described as “somewhere between Bill Gates and Buddha on the wisdom scale”. McKeown works as a strategic adviser and is a well-known speaker on subjects including innovation, engagement, human potential, customer experience, marketing, team building, and competitive advantage. He has written six books, including Unshrink featuring the myths that stop our people doing their best work and a set of new principles to engage their interest and ability.

Drowning in the sea of things I need to do, should do, and want to do, I feel like I am lucky just to tread water—just get through the things of today as best I can. But like treading water, I get frustrated because I’m not making any progress a more simplified existence. I’m just desperately dog-paddling to keep my head above the water of my complicated life.

I began last week with the spirit of an Olympic swimmer only to become sick on Monday afternoon and was out of the race for the rest of the week. As I laid there in bed, I thought about the time when, as a young girl, my family and I went to live in Germany for 1-1/2 years. We didn’t know the language—just ask my mom who flapped her wings like a chicken when she tried to buy some poultry to cook for dinner. Needless to say, we six children were left to our own devices when it came to entertaining ourselves. This was pre -video, - personal computer, - ipod, and – cell phone. Local television didn’t hold our interest in a language we didn’t understand enough to make sense of. But, thanks to reel-to-reel tapes, we could listen to the same few tapes over and over. Those tapes contained three types of audio: my parents really square music, some German beer drinking songs, and Bill Cosby to listen to over and over. Needless to say, in our desperation to replace the Saturday morning cartoons we left behind in the U.S., we listened to Cosby hundreds of times and can quote him verbatim. The sad thing about it is after all these years I laugh at the same stories and same punch lines I did as a kid.

You may be wondering, what this has to do with my quest for living a simplified life. Well, I’m getting to that. And, no, I am not going to talk at length about those good-old-days in Germany (although I could and I reserve my right to do so in the future.) Rather, I want to refer to one of Cosby’s lines in his unique retelling of biblical story, Noah’s Ark [The Best of Bill Cosby]. The Lord is hinting to a reluctant, dubious Noah why he must build an Ark. And the Lord asks “How long can you tread water?” While I’m not planning on gathering up two animals of every kind to strike out on my ocean of despair, I think there is value in learning to tread water.

Like treading water where we must to keep our hands moving and our head above water, we need to figure out what every-day tasks we face every day. Once these tasks are identified, we can begin to devise a plan to accomplish them in an efficient way. The goal is to stream-line these every-day tasks so we can have more room in our lives to focus on more fulfilling goals—such as tackling the children’s scrapbooks, finishing the home improvement projects, or perhaps, more quality time with family and friends. I find it hard to enjoy each moment when I know I have stacks of paperwork, piles of old newspapers, dinner-hour approaching and no groceries in the cupboards.

Although we will find daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly tasks that fill up our lives, it’s important to begin by making a running list of everything we need to do to keep our head above water. Here’s the beginning of my list:
- Mail : bills, wedding announcements, letters, etc.
- Finances : paying bills, bookkeeping, balancing bank statements, receipts
- Newspaper : daily access, accumulating old papers before recycling
- Newsclips : (I like to collect news stories that interest me)
- Photos : downloading, printing, accessibility
- Camcorder : same as photos
- Flyers
- Calendar
- Scrapbook memorabilia : how to store it and get it accessible
- Menu / Groceries
- Housekeeping : dishes, vacuuming, tidying, etc.

I was surprised by what I felt confronted me on a regular basis. Some tasks are handled with ease. Others are handled easily once you determine a consistent plan of how you are going to deal with them. Others tend to get shoved aside, accumulates and finally consumes a large block of time in order to be dealt with. We’ll discuss many of these in detail and develop strategies for that can be applied for unique situations as time goes on. But for now, start building your list.

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Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau

the frittering is truly in the details

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Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862), was an American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, best-known for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, Walden(1854). Thoreau was one of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism. His Civil Disobedience (1849) influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
[Onlineliterature.com]

It is the perfection of God’s works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion.
- Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in Religion of Isaac Newton (Fremantle lectures)(1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120.

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Sir Isaac Newton [1643-1727] a theologian, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher and alchemist. Newton is best known for his treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This work helped remove the last doubts about heliocentrism and advanced the scientific revolution. Among his other accomplishments, he invented the reflecting telescope, developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum, and shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development in calculus. Newton was deemed more influential that Albert Einstein in a 2005 poll of the Royal Society of who had the greatest effect on the history of science.

We’re all broken. We’re all messed up pigs. When we can accept that, we’re ready to become the new creations God intended us to be. And that’s when the fun starts!
- Phil Visher, Sidney & Norman, a tale of two pigs (2006)

Okay. It looks like I’m ready for ALOT of fun. I long to know and to become what the Lord intends for me to be.

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Phil Vischer was born 16 Jun 1966 and is a writer, actor, animator, puppeteer, and the founder of Big Idea Productions, the company best known for bringing computer animated vegetables to life in the popular VeggieTales series.