Anyone who knows me, knows that I rarely sit and do one thing at a time. While I read, I walk around. While I watch TV, I cross stitch. While I work on school-related things, I listen to podcasts. My grandma once asked me if my hands were ever still. Nope. As I mentioned before, I have a mild obsession with making goals and moving full steam ahead. How do I balance that with an almost equally strong desire to simplify, to cut out the extraneous noise and stress.

I will look at where I have been before looking at how that applies to decisions as I move forward. Most obviously, my desire to achieve has manifested as an obsession with making goals. Without a goal, even a patently obviously unattainable goal, I feel aimless and restless. I am the odd duck motivated by achievement badges that can be collected in obscure stretches of cyberspace for any number of different activities. For example, every year since becoming a member of Goodreads, I have set a reading goal and adjusted it if I surpassed the original goal or if it looked like I wouldn’t be able to complete the goal. I know of no other person on the planet who might care that I met, did not meet, or surpassed my goal.

This tendency is not without a dark side. I have seen myself pursue a worthless, completely unimportant goal at the expense of time spent on things that truly matter. For example, several times I have downloaded games like Mahjong, gotten hooked on passing each level with all three stars, looked up to discover that an hour had passed and only after weeks of this abruptly deleted the app because I could not wean myself from the arbitrary goals. It’s this that usually prompts my simple living aspirations.

I read blog posts about people who have eliminated many distractions and wonder what I could get done if I stopped habitually checking Facebook every time I have a free minute. Simplifying the noise that crowds my mind appeals to me. There comes the dilemma. I still think in terms of “what I could get done.”

How do I balance the two seemingly conflicting desires? How do I select the best of both worlds? How do I eliminate the damaging business of trying to do too much while preserving the deeply personally beneficial drive to experience life to the fullest through that which I accomplish?

Those are questions to which I have no simple answer. (Please pardon the pun. I could no resist.) This is where I believe that my simple living aspiration can be most beneficial. As I move forward, I hope to apply the desire to eliminate all stress to and properly prioritize the choices of how I spend my time. For me, I believe that diligent application of this concept will help eliminate negative stress as well as bring further clarity.

I hope to return to this periodically through the coming year.