I continued to reflect on my morning run along the ocean shore. In considering the heavy things that remained in the sand from the overnight winds, I'm finding that there is an even more difficult question than the one I posed in part one.
Are there some heavy things remaining which used to be important but now have gained so much weight that they are distractions at best or are dangerous stumbling blocks at worst?
Gathering and accumulating is easy within affluent westernized cultures. We focus on the freedom to accumulate. Less often do we consider the freedom not to accumulate.
As 2014 came to a close I worked to get my inbox of emails down to ZERO. That is right, no emails in my inbox. It started with going back over old emails and deleting things that I just did not have the time or the care to read. In some cases it meant unsubscribing from email lists. In other cases it was admitting to myself the reality that I simply wasn’t ever going to get to that email that had been sitting there for over a year. The volume of email was a weight that had grown too large over time.
Today my email inbox looks buff and ripped. I’m keeping its figure trim by unsubscribing to anything that no longer holds my interest and by dealing with a message only once and moving on. I’m keeping the inbox fit and good-looking by not checking or sending emails as often as I used to.
Now that I have lost some weight, what have I gained? I have gained about an hour a day where I am working on writing the book on Exploration for the 21st century that has been on my to do list for two years.
The extra weight in our lives holds us back from the discoveries we desire. Is it time for you to lose some weight?