“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” ― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

The older I get, the less I care about the accumulation of things like accolades and titles and possessions. Sure, it’s nice to have that crystal bowl gifted to my bride and I when we got married, but we’ve never touched it, save to dust it off and place it back on the shelf again. So why do we hold on to it anymore? So the shelf won’t be empty?

The thing is, it’s easier to just leave things in place as we move on to other things. But then we have all these things we don’t really need or want accumulating all around us. What’s the point of it all? It all amounts to nothing but an anchor. We all need an anchor now and then, but it doesn’t need to be so big that we can’t haul it up when we want to move on to the next beautiful place in our lives.

Lately I’ve been looking at the roles I play in my life, and deciding which to dust off and keep and which to eliminate from my life. The person I once was is nice, but if I’m not that person anymore, why keep doing the same old things I did then? We ought to eliminate the non-essential from our lives that we might linger with the essential that much more.

When we think of elimination, we ought to consider too the very habits that define who we are now. Is writing this blog every day bringing me to the person I want to become in the future, or is it holding me back from doing something else that would carry me there? You, dear reader, may be asking the same question about visiting this blog regularly, and isn’t it appropriate to do so? All is fair when we decide who we ought to be.

And that’s the point. We should question everything that holds us to here. Do we have too much anchor to simply haul up and go when we hear the call of that faraway place? It’s fair to ask ourselves such things, but harder to act upon the answers that we arrive at. The one thing that is essential is to find and focus on the precious few, wherever it takes us.