Almost minimalist

All the food I’d bought at the supermarket on Sunday suddenly looked disgusting. A litany of plant-based recipes in which cashews and nutritional yeast replaced cheese and bok choy was to accompany my chili-tofu. Now, I don’t generally eat much meat or dairy, and I love tofu (and even bok choy), but suddenly all of my recipes seemed way too complicated, not to mention nauseating (though, let’s blame the virus/food poisoning for that, maybe).

For whatever reason, this overly complicated list of groceries, ingredients, and recipes forced my gaze toward other realms of my life where over-complication was likely or previously common: the news (how many newspapers, how many news blogs or political analysts was I subscribed to?), exercise (how long and complicated were the workouts I was performing? how attentively or obsessively was I tracking things like heart rate zones?), work (was I “doing too much” like my kids sometimes accuse me?), social media (how often was I checking it? how much unnecessary information was I letting into my brain?), my purchasing (was I still buying too many books or frivolous items I didn’t need?), my habits and intentions (was I spreading myself too thin, as I often do, trying to accomplish or ‘improve’ too much in too many categories at once? or tracking too much data or information?), sleep (was I trying too many weird practices or supplements to get better rest?). Horrified, I found myself answering YES or TOO MUCH or TOO MANY to all of these questions. Quickly, I pulled out my journal and wrote an entry titled “MAX CAPACITY.”

Like my intestines had been cleansed, however involuntarily, my life also needed a cleanse, and this one, I’d happily volunteer for. So… what did I do, what did I elect to eliminate, and how? I…

• Combed my shelves and pulled out all the books I WILL NEVER READ or REREAD and put them in a bag and threw them in the trunk of my car to drop off at the Goodwill (Goodwill of Western New York has me to thank for a large portion of its book section, I am sure).

• Unsubscribed from several political analysts. They’re very smart and I love reading their thoughts, but it’s too much. It was politics overload, I was losing my mind trying to keep up with it all. I saved just my favorite few.

• Deleted the instagram app from my phone—I want to quit the habit of reflexively checking something that, even in just ten minutes a day, fills my head with tons of excess information I simply do not need. I’ll reinstall the app eventually, I think, when I am less trained to check it without thinking. I hardly ever check Facebook, and don’t use the app, so I didn’t make any changes there.

• Erased “meditate every day” from my habit tracker. Maybe someday I’ll finally become someone who meditates “properly”, but for now, journaling is my meditation, and walking is too. I’ve tried meditating for over a decade now, and it’s never quite stuck.

• Switched to a simpler/less time-consuming workout program on the Sweat App (for the record, I LOVED the program I was doing, but I just need something less right now. Also, that app is great and totally takes the thought and guesswork out of strength training, for me anyway. I’ve tried a lot of fitness apps over the years, and this one is the only one I’ve really stuck with. Ironically, it makes working out really simple, so this is probably why).

• Took OFF my fitness watch and put it in a drawer—for a while, not forever.

• Put all my mega complex 100% plant-based ultra health-nut cookbooks in the basement and put my favorite cookbooks on a smaller, more prominent display: The Joy of Cooking, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, various books from the SkinnyTaste series, and The Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health (I have several cookbooks from the Moosewood series, but that one is my favorite). Close on hand, too, is The Book on Pie. Of course.

• Deleted the food tracking app I was using to make sure I consumed enough vegetables, fruits, beans, greens, nuts/seeds, whole grains, and water everyday.

• Put away books with titles like “How Not to Die”. It’s valuable information on nutrition and fitness, and I have no doubt I’ll read it someday, but not right now. I have too many books like that just laying around my house, scaring the (perhaps literal?) shit out of me.

• Made a list of truly NECESSARY ITEMS and then added the habit “BUY NOTHING UNNECESSARY” to my habit tracker (much more important for me than meditating at this point in my life).

• Simplified my plan to tackle insomnia: KEEP A CONSISTENT BEDTIME FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE, and, SleepyTime tea, because it’s a nice ritual.

• Simplified my habit tracker: Bed by 10:30, Journal, Be Creative 3x/Week, Exercise 30 Minutes, and, duh, BUY NOTHING UNNECESSARY.

I felt better immediately. And I’ve felt progressively better each day since. Today when I went grocery shopping, I chose simpler recipes (still healthy, still not a lot of meat or dairy), but simpler. My grocery bill was significantly cheaper, for one, and two, the trip was quicker and less stressful. For dinner tonight I made pasta with chick peas, arugula salad with home-made lemon vinaigrette (the only dressing I’ll make from scratch, because it’s so easy) and parmesan. For dessert I made a fruit crisp. I wanted to make it healthy-ish, so I made one from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Dessert. I found a super-duper-ultra-healthy version online that used like ten additional ingredients and my mind started to whir and tick like some crazed machine and I just had to say “NO!” to myself, instead opting to throw in a handful of goji berries and replace the white flour with wheat flour and call it a day.

This has long been a big problem of mine: not only the tendency to DO TOO MUCH, but the parallel problem of being unable to KEEP THINGS SIMPLE. I have devised organizational systems for my classroom that sound genius but end up being utter disasters—far too complicated to maintain for even one day… yet at inception, seemed to be flawless. I have always had too many books, with a horrible tendency to be unable to stop myself from buying more (the availability of cheap, used books that can be purchased online aids and abets this bad habit). And every attempt at self-improvement has started with trying to improve one or two things about myself or life and spiraled into a massive, complex web of new habits, rules, and regimens for me to follow. And it never works, of course, I always end up collapsing under the weight of my own clunky, cumbersome machinery.

Why do I do this? I can’t be sure. I think I have a natural tendency toward excess, toward more/many and complex and different that causes me to think things that are minimal, simple, and familiar might not be “enough” do the trick. And while I can’t be sure that I’ll never get myself into this mess again, I am relatively sure something is changed for good this time, and that any future messes of overcomplexity will be smaller and less complex than the ones of my recent and distant past. I feel like I finally see clearly just how overcomplicated I make my life and my work and basically everything I touch. I see how exhausted it makes me, how it overloads my brain and body, how it drains my sense of joy and dries up any creative juices (all juices are channeled into TRACKING, FIGURING OUT, CHANGING, IMPROVING!). Like my coworker often tells me: “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time, Katie. We’ll kill ourselves if we try to do that.” Yes, apt, especially so if one has a poor track record in wheel-building (when it comes to certain kinds of wheels, anyway).

Even this is true: I haven’t posted in here because my ideas for posts were too complicated and convoluted. I would write them, but never muster the energy to finish them—they were too sprawling for a blog post, they were multi-limbed beasts chomping at the bit, deformed by the medium into which I was trying to force them. But I would like to resume my habit of writing in here once a month, and I’d like to get back into the habit of working on my essays, revisions and new ones. But this won’t be possible if I burn through all my energy and juice on my excessive and complex pursuits, nor if I’m overwhelmed by too many books and too much stuff. So, in keeping with my desire to keep it simple, today I sat down and wrote a short list of “Writing Goals for the Near Future”, which consists mostly of revisions I must complete before I go diving off into other oceans, concocting new essays. I can dip my toe in the water here and there, do a little creative research, but I must finish the seven essays in my thesis, first. And, I’ll repeat myself again (more for me than for you): I won’t be able to finish any essays when I’m teaching unless I keep things simple—at work, at home, everywhere. And I can’t just save all my creative writing for the summer. I just can’t. I cannot write for only two months of the year and be happy with my life.

So, I’m not going to try this time. I’m going to do. Less.

xoxo, KATIE