The Benefits of Minimalism

In a previous article, I spoke about the idea of relapse with regards to IBS. A lot of times relapse and ‘bad periods’ with IBS happen because we lose focus on what is important for our wellness. Very often, this lack of focus is caused by the striving, reaching, rat race existence that many of us live today. This is the world that we live in and it is difficult to simply stop and remove yourself from that race…of rats…hmmm. Minimalism is just a fancy word for living simply. I suppose, that when I think of my desire to live simply, it is my wish to be satisfied with what I have and to remove the focus from what I think I need or what I don’t have. We spend a lot of time worrying about what we don’t have. My Father once said to me, in an effort to purvey the wisdom of simplicity, is that happiness does not correspond to an increase in wealth. He went on to say that the finer things that would be available with any financial increase would basically negate that particular increase. Always reaching for the proverbial golden ring. The point is that if we are always just waiting to make more money to collect more ‘stuff’, it is sort of like chasing your own tail for your entire life. If you are busy chasing the tail, it removes focus from what is actually important in our lives; our health and connectedness to those around us.

Simplified existence

I think I chose to talk about minimalism because I used to chase my tail somethin’ fierce. It would be like well, wow, I’ve never made this much money before…I can now have THIS car. THIS car is way better than my old car. I did this with my clothes, my furniture, my house, even my groceries. All my STUFF had to be better. Better than before, because before wasn’t good enough. If you pay attention to this kind of thinking, you will see how much of your life you are missing with these types of pre-occupations. I started making the change to a simplified existence over the period of many years. Some of my choices for ‘simple’ were conscious and some were forced on me. I lost everything I had after my divorce. Do you know what? I honestly didn’t care that much about it. I cared about my kids and the change it would have on my life, but didn’t much care about the financial loss. Now, some of you are like, this guy’s crazy or some kind of extremist. I am crazy, but that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here ;-). What I realized is that once basic needs are met (roof, food, clothes, heat) it is very important to spend time on the other important things in my life and there are a lot of them. It is great to be successful for a lot of reasons. But how do YOU define success? Family, friends, health, work, community are all important to our overall wellbeing.

Reducing what's not critical

I know some of you who read this are probably very career driven. I know others are on disability. This article is not a critique about ones liveliness so much as a statement about reducing the amount of things in our lives that are not critical. Why I think this is important for this site and IBS is that the more things we have taking our attention away from our own peace of mind, the more chance of increased trouble with IBS symptoms.