It's said that minimalists de-clutter because it brings them peace. To have less increases happiness, provided one can put a meal on the table and a roof over one's head. Sometimes I feel that the entire problems of the world can be reduced to this bare fact: we want more than we need to be happy.
I think of this as I plant trees this week. Each hole is a round zero, an empty space to fill with a eucalyptus or an acacia. From these empty spaces grow forests, and when the years of rain come, the seeds explode from the trees and plant themselves about the place. This week I put thirty tree guards around thirty self seeded trees, protecting them from the mower and the rabbits. They'll grow the fastest. Having more in this sense makes me immeasurably happy.
There's things that I'm not minimal about. The more trees I plant, the more I put my hands in the soil, the happier I am.
The more time I spend in nature, the happier I am.
This week I found myself wanting. I always do. It's hard not to - the assaults of capitalism hit you from all angles. We saw a beautiful house in the forest, much bigger and more beautiful than ours, and I was tempted to remortgage to move there. Perhaps I'd be happier with a newer place. Instead, I went out and planted trees, listened to the untunely sqwerkerk of wattle birds, the strange laugh of the kookaburra. I watched the tiny spotted pardalotes and blue fairy wrens dart about, unconcerned with bank balanceds and interest rates and retirement funds.
I imagined instead the forest I was growing, let my imagination take flight into building this property into something I believe far more important than anything I'm told is important. We keep using resources without thinking about creating them.
Out in nature, I'm more relaxed. My mind doesn't travel to the wants and desires. I simply am, here, now. The more I reduce any stimuli outside nature, the more peaceful and happy I feel.
It's about turning my mind away from the information and stimuli that the world throws at me.
The best information is the information that comes from nature, my greatest teacher. Out there planting trees, I'm aware of how I will die soon, relatively, and the trees will outlive me. They'll keep giving, in years of rain, sending their seeds out into the world. The fungi nudge into their cells, providing nutrients. In the hotter years, they will shade the ground, shelter the birds. Life is ever changing, nothing is permanent. Even how I feel this year, anxious and sad, will pass. I'm just a tree being battered by the winter gales - I'll feel like I'm falling, uprooted, but when spring comes I'll be okay again, for a while.
There's a kind of multiplying abundance that comes from subtracting things in your life: objects, distractions, people. The less you have the more you have. It's worth fighting for. You subtract stuff but gain a lot.
There's a lot of beauty in less.
And it is an art, a skill, to turn away from thinking about stuff. You need to catch yourself, be aware of how your brain turns toward wanting, and ask yourself why you want it. It's neuroscience and a buddhist practice too.
If you're thinking that an object, something you can't take with you when you die, is a key to your happiness, then you're still learning. The new car rusts, is rear ended in a carpark. The husband ups and leaves. The beautiful bowl you bought shatters on the tiles into thirty pieces. The necklace is lost. What happens then? New bowls, new cars, new lovers. Are you happy then? And then? And then?
Nature provides, when you pay attention.
Turning to the beautiful simplicity of nature is an act of anti wanting, a refusal to participate in a culture searching for something that was there all along.
This post was written in response to the prompt set this week by The Minimalist, a community focussed on simplicity and the idea that less is more - more peaceful, more conscious, more real. You can find the prompt here.
With Love,
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