Part 6b of my Magic Test of Seven
My learning’s from the book: “Everything that remains” from The Minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus
I’ll start off again with a few sentences, sentence fragments and dialogues, which made me “ear” the book. Actually, I made a lot of dog ears . . . This memoir really is a wonderful read. It is a book about minimalism, but more so a book about daring to change your life and follow your heart. So here we go, bear with me, and hopefully enjoy my extract. Be aware that some sentences might seem odd without the entire context but for me they each have a beauty of their own:
“Our memories are not in things. Our memories are in us.”
“Unfortunately though, I wasn’t gifted with a congenital writing quill. In fact, I was terrible when I started. I didn’t know anything – not a damn thing – about grammar or syntax or sentence structure. I could hardly cobble together a coherent independent clause, let alone a sentence that felt urgent or interesting or even vaguely alive. But then again, most things in life aren’t innate.”
“. . . A person must be willing to drudge through the drudgery to find the joy on the other side.”
“People often avoid the truth for fear of destroying the illusions they’ve built. Up until now, I’ve done this only in the corporate world – when the reward was monetary – but not with something like writing, which better aligns with my interest, values, and beliefs. If I’m honest with myself, I haven’t really spent enough time honing my desired craft; I haven’t spent the time needed to become a craftsman, to be the writer I desire to be. Instead, I’ve aspired all over the place, writing haphazardly whenever I get excited – and I excite easily.”
“. . . but the tedium is inevitable. Writing is difficult. And writing well is, well, thorny and intricate and considerably more complex. It’s hard, and who wants to do something hard when there are so many passive diversions with which I can fill my days?”
‘… We are taught to work a soul-crushing job for like forty years so that one day we might actually be able to retire and enjoy our lives for like three years.’
‘Three years?’
‘Yes. Not too long ago I saw an insurance-actuary study showing that the average male retiree’s lifespan is roughly three years after retirement.’
‘Shit’
‘Shit indeed. We’re taught to work foolishly hard for a non-living entity, donating our most precious commodity – our time – for a paycheck.’
‘And but then there’s the idea of doing something more meaningful with my life. Something I’m passionate about. Although it’s usually codified with salient statements of significance –declarations of “following one’s passion,” “doing what you’re meant to do with your life,” or “embracing your true calling” –I simply refer to it as finding my life’s mission.’
“. . . when everyone is trying so hard to be different, they all become the same, homogenized by uniqueness.”
“. . . are we all just Pavlov’s dogs, drooling on command for a morsel of attention?”
“What you see is the culmination of years of hard and steady work. There is nothing overnight about it.”
“Awareness. Awareness is the most precious kind of freedom.”
“You see. People work hard for two reasons: they are externally inspired to do so, or they are internally motivated to do so. Sometimes it’s a combination of both. Sure some people can be momentarily inspired by goal attainment, but that kind of inspiration doesn’t last beyond the goal itself.”
‘What you mean by, you people?‘ I can’t help but smile with a face full of mirth, a smile I’d probably make fun of if it wasn’t my own goofy, love-struck grin.
“The truth is, you can skip the pursuit of happiness altogether and just be happy.”
“Ryan has a way of keeping me in line, humble, grounded.”
So what did take away?
- Doing what you love makes you shine ♥. It can truly pay off to listen to your heart and have the courage to follow your dreams
- Mastery takes time, will and dedication
- Having true friends is the best thing that can ever happen to anyone
- It is possible to translate intense – even cluttered – feelings into beautiful words and phrases
The Minimalists intrigue me, even though I have no desire to become a minimalist, they inspire me nonetheless or perhaps the more so.
How can a person that can write a sentence like this, not be inspiring:
“Last night’s thunderstorm must’ve pulled forward this, this sky, clear and blue, deep-blue blue, the same blue as receptionless digital TV waiting for some kind of input, an empty sky, save only for the flock of blackbirds making a mess of the atmosphere overhead, flying north-northwest, way up past the treeline, the temperature slowly rising with the sun this morning, 8:33 a.m. To be exact, too early for the Midwest’s summertime hellfire to’ve set in, but late enough to be surrounded by daylight, a pleasant, productive time of the day, the sun ascending above and behind the westward-facing Newcom Park, which, although the park is situated near the edge of downtown Dayton, barely two blocks from Fifth and Patterson Streets (one of the busiest intersections in the city) , the treelined neighborhood itself is muted, hushed but not noiseless, quiet enough that you can actually hear every noise, the tweets and twerps emitting from various species of birds nesting in the trees, the leaves rustling slightly with the wind, a train braying its grave horn in the distance, a car struggling to start and then finally puttering to life directly across the street from my little one-bedroom apartment, nature’s own Muzak, everything far enough off the beaten path that I can exercise shirtless without catching awkward stares, and so I am, in fact, hanging from the monkey bars without a shirt, counting in unintelligible grunts, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, dressed in logoless black mesh shorts and tennis shoes the colour of freshly poured cement, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, advancing through a series of pullups, my body’s motion deliberate, working at a cadence, panting fiercely and letting out controlled babel among the playground’s metal fixtures, forced to stop pulling myself toward the playground’s equipment at twenty-six and a half, muscle failure, exhausted, worn out, but it’s that good kind of worn out, how you feel when your mind and body’ve synchronized, heart and thoughts pulsing at the same rate, on the same continuum, transcending intention, the soft crunch of mulch underneath my shoe’s soles when I drop from the cold iron, a natural brick walkway to my right where I do sets of pushups and squats between intervals of pullups, here alone, basking in solitude, just me and a handful of feral cats who loom through an alley on the north side of the park, the cats protected from the sun by shade of an 1860-era brick home whose bricks are regrettably painted fire-engine red, the occasional passerby passing by on foot, which, even though they’re almost always inattentive and typing in some sort of handheld device, mesmerized in the glow of their apparatuses, makes the shirtless thing a bit odd at times, not that it actually is odd in Dayton, because it’s not, at least not anywhere east of the Great Miami River and north of Oakwood, where the de facto dresscode for like ninety percent of guys, beer gut or no, is basically just dusty bluejeans and steeltoe workboots and no shirt, but I’m still a bit self-conscious nonetheless, perhaps unnecessarily so, since I used to weigh two hundred forty pounds at my corpulent zenith, which even at six-two was considerably overweight for me, all belly fat and man-boobs and pale dough-like features, a jowl that was always made worse under the constraints of a necktie and a dress-shirt’s buttoned top button, my biceps’s skin marked with straited stretchmarks, stretchmarks that’re there even now, faded but still lingering, a final fragmentary reminder of my fatter, younger days, a paunchy youth, and so yeah for a long time I’ve been kind of trepidatious about removing my shirt in public, similar to the fat kid who wears his teeshirt to supposedly protect himself ‘from the sun’ at the local natatorium, even though we all know that the tinted glass ceiling there shields everyone from any skin-burning UVs, and so of course even though I’m down to a healthy one-sixty-five now and’ve significantly changed my body’s size and shape since embracing this whole minimalism thing, eating healthily and exercising each day, alternating among the gym and the park and various at-home exercises mixed with five to ten miles of brisk walking almost every day (wheater permitting of course), and now can even see what I think might be (dare I say) my abdominal muscles where a spare tire used to be, but so yes I still think twice before removing my shirt publicly, a flinch that keeps me rooted in the past, a past I’m working hard to untether from, distancing myself from the career and identity that came with it, from all the material possessions I gave so much meaning to for so many years, from almost everything that became commonplace during my over-indulgent twenties.”
Indeed, Ryan, a round of applause from me too.
Thank you, to the both of you, for sharing your passion with the world.
