Nat

Ok, so it’s a favorite topic of mine, dealing with clutter. I took a big step today dealing with my email inbox. First there was a great article on reducing email inbox clutter in the July 2008 print edition of Macworld. That article further referred to this series of posts at the 43folders.com personal productivity website. This series addresses the psychological reasons for keeping too many emails (the writing is hysterical), and then it offers simple solutions.

Some are practical, including a great sample schedule for how to tackle email in a typical work day so that you aren’t becoming a slave to the new email message notification beep. But my favorite comment is when the author says, Wouldn’t it be great to suck a little less?

That could be a motto for me as I strive to be easier on myself. A lot of my friends are like me in wanting to become more superhuman by trying to do everything. Naturally, none of us can do everything. Those who thrive take stock of themselves, their energy, their time and priorities, and they put their effort where it will make the biggest impact.

So applying these simple guidelines today for scanning and deleting email, I cut the volume of stored messages in my inbox by 800 items. The article calls this getting the piano off your foot. Call it that, or call it sucking a little less. Either way it’s liberating.

Two of my friends spoke to me yesterday about taking a risk. They are facing some financial uncertainties and decided to spend some money on themselves anyway. For one it was to have an organizer come in and help her arrange files in her office. She knew this would give her peace of mind that she could find important records if someone asks to see them.

For another, it was to rent an office so he would have a place to work away from his house. Neither of them had to spend the money, and the thriftier choice would have been not to spend. Still, they have both been practicing how to expect abundance. They each felt that spending the money was going to take them closer to what they wanted to achieve. My friend with the organizer was smiling so broadly I could feel it over the phone.

Each of them told me that I could learn a lesson about how to have faith. When we stay on the lookout for what will move us toward joy, we will be rewarded with greater courage. It is not the risk itself but the motive to move towards one’s dreams despite the risk that gives us a greater sense of power and freedom. Faith will do that for them. It can do it for you and me.

My friends Flo and Connie have commiserated with me about the challenge of too much paper. Flo’s advice to take it one piece at a time is the only advice that solves the problem of mess, whether it is small or large.

The real problem comes when the mess grows so big that the sheer volume of it overwhelms me. At a certain point, I start to tell myself it is so bad that I wouldn’t know where to start. Flo reminds me: it doesn’t matter where I start, only that I start by picking something up and putting it away.

Tonight Connie told me that something told her to start cleaning up her mess, her paper. Then she hired someone to get her started, and they worked for 11 hours over three days. The most important piles had drifted to the top, she said. I found that encouraging because I have a sense of keeping the most important things where I can get to them, at the top of my piles.

My instincts aren’t completely dead. They are helping me even when I am weary. I feel the same about what I need to do to feel better about things: start with some small action. This week, Connie and I decided to call and coach one another twice a week until both of us are more un-stuck. She sounded full of purpose tonight, after what she would call a “rampage of appreciation.” There are far worse places to start.

I can start by being grateful that she and I have reached out to one another.

Since my father died a year ago, I have become messier than ever before. The disorder I create around me reflects my inability to place everything where it belongs. Looking at the piles of papers, books, and clothes strewn around my desk, I realize that, for the moment, I know how to start things but not how to finish them. I could analyze this tendency, analyze myself, and conclude that I am shying away from endings. Maybe it is that simple.

I don’t really want to turn the page. Dropping items wherever I am lets me avoid finality of any kind.

But it’s also a nuisance. When I was very young, I looked around my bedroom one day and decided that I didn’t want to live in the middle of a mess. From that point until I married twenty-two years later, I carefully put everything away: clothes, papers, pens, books. I’ve lost that habit, lost it long before I lost my father. It’s just that I am more likely to look around at the mess I’ve made now and think, “I will never be able to clean this up.”

At the same time, there does come a point at which you say to yourself, “Enough.” There are other people who are bearing up under much more tormenting circumstances. Who am I really to let everything go?

My wife always tells me that the way you clean up a mess is to pick up one thing at a time. I have always known she was right about that. The trick is to go ahead and start.

Flo’s blog page includes a link to purchase the book Writing the Mind Alive by Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon. I finally bought the book this week and read most of it on the plane today.

I can’t believe I waited so long or that I had never heard of it before Flo put it up. The authors are former literature professors who have been teaching this writing method since 1982. (See www.Proprioceptivewriting.com.) Their method articulates a writing process that emphasizes learning to hear and transcribe your thoughts in your own voice. They cite other writing process teachers Peter Elbow and Natalie Goldberg, but they emphasize the ability of their approach to provide clarity to you about your life.

I can hardly wait to start. One of the interesting suggestions they make is that you play Baroque music while doing Writes, because its slower movements employ a rhythm that closely mirrors the human heart beat. I’ve already tried this today in the Northwest airport club in Memphis where I have been working between flights. It works like a dream, especially with my great Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

The sudden arrival of a 25-year old writing process method in my life the day after I pledged to start back in on regular writing process typifies the kind of serendipity that Michael has taught me to expect. Another element of the method that I like is the authors’ insistance that 30 minutes’ practice in a day is more than enough to feel its full effects over time. That seems like a very little commitment for the possible payoff of clarity in one’s writing, emotional development, and spiritual progress.

Go figure.

The new Time Magazine has Al Gore on the cover under the headline “The Last Temptation of Al Gore.” Obviously the teaser headline focuses on whether or not Al Gore is the perfect Democratic candidate for president in 2008 if the current front runners stumble. Gore himself, though, shows much keener interest in the major challenges facing our society: first, global warming, and second, the crisis of irrationality in American politics, about which he has written his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” In that book, which Time excerpts, Gore writes that the rise of television in the last 50 years has fundamentally eroded our country’s ability to debate the most pressing issues we face.

His conclusion is startling and hopeful: we can take steps to resolve this issue, and the Internet may be a key to how we do it. He also quotes Gandhi’s concept of a “truth force.” The truth force posits that humans have an innate ability to recognize the most powerful truths.

The article is remarkable on many, many levels, starting with the way Gore has emerged from the personal pain of losing an election in which he won the popular vote, to become a spokesperson for attention to climate change, an Oscar-award winning filmmaker, a board member of Apple and a senior advisor to Google, as well as a best-selling author.

I have to confess that Gore didn’t inspire me at all when he ran for president in 2000, but that’s not really the point. What thrills me is his example of reacting to an enormous setback to re-invent himself as an even more interesting person than he would have been had he won.

In the Time article, Tipper Gore describes her husband as having complete freedom to do what he wants, in the way that he wants to do it. She makes it sound pretty grand.

Meanwhile, Gore believes resolutely in Gandhi’s notion of our collective ability to recognize the truth we need to learn. The entire article made an inspiring case for the future: a person can respond to disappointment and failure with growth and energy, and our society can recover from the apathy cultivated by over-indulgence in television.

My friend R and I had lunch outside today. I sat under the umbrella, and she wore sunglasses. Nothing makes soup and salad taste better to me than eating in the sunshine. Even in a chain restaurant next to the street in front of the mall, the experience felt cosmopolitan and Continental.

My friend is a lifelong student of personal development, in the best possible way. She thinks deeply about the value of her life to herself and to others, and she willingly shares her observations and insights about what seems to work and what doesn’t. Another quality of hers that I admire immensely is her absolute willingness to tell the truth and to be direct. I find it hard to have a superficial conversation with her, because she has a way of letting you know that it would really be much more interesting to skip to meaningful topics.

With her, I can’t lie about myself, and when I start to, I sound completely foolish.

Toward the end of the conversation, she talked about how she is learning to take things more slowly. We had been talking about reading books. I have stacks of them on my night stand and try to read about 10 at a time. Often this means I don’t finish what I start. Meanwhile, R has adopted the discipline to leave only one out next to her bed and to read it to the end before proceeding to the next.

For some reason, this habit strikes me as a towering achievement. Both of us acknowledged that we often want to have everything at once: solutions to problems, life ambitions, books read. She is learning to be more methodical and more measured, and she seems quite serene about it. I was impressed and envious, but I’m hoping that I can learn from her how to do this myself.

I’m not a patient person, so it was ironic that I had 24 hours worth of airport delays over the weekend to test my patience. During this vacation, I’ve quoted from two books (Happiness by Mattieu Ricard and Buddha or Bust by Perry Garfinkel). As it turns out, both discuss at length using any daily challenge to develop your skills at transforming your reaction to circumstance.

In a nutshell, each says that we have to cultivate our reactions to unpleasant experiences if we want to feel better. Usually I hate to be cooped up, and as I read one of Ricard’s chapters, I was sitting on the ground at Dulles in a snow storm for 3 hours in a completely full 30-seater plane.

Instead of my usual squirmy, self-pitying reacation, I drifted gently into a nap and then woke up and read eagerly till we pulled back to the gate. All in all, I feel more queasy about it now than I did while experiencing it.

It’s inspiring to be encouraged by people who say that mindfulness practice–steady effort to keep your focus right–helps you get beyond your own frustrations. What a great lesson.

Matthieu Ricard, a cellular biologist turned Buddhist monk, has written a magnificent book called Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. In addition to his work writing, translating, and teaching, Ricard has participated with several Western biologists in experiments to determine whether meditation changes the structure of the brain.

This book aims to define happiness as an internal quality and to teach the skill of acquiring it more reliably. At the end of the first chapter, he says that happiness is all about a love of life. Then he continues:

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding onewself to the pain and imperfectiosn of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is alos about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

I’ll share more of his insights in future posts, but I’m really encouraged by this one.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

The Buddha said that, and it sounds like a close corollary to the Eckhart Tolle description of sin I quoted earlier this week.

I see plenty of anger, and I feel too much of it myself. I’m sure I cause plenty also, even though I try hard not to. Of all the damaging behaviours, anger is the one I understand best that I should avoid.

Wouldn’t the world be more pleasant if no one cut you off in traffic, shouted at you for making a mistake, treated you rudely in front of your co-workers? So maybe you should avoid dooing those things yourself. That’s what I tell myself most mornings in the car on the way to my office.

I’m happiest on the days when I take my own advice.