cultivation

It's easy to assume that the path from minimalism to a meaningful life is a straight line from cause to effect. The whole point is to eliminate the excess which stands in the way of a meaningful life. So surely once that is done, a meaningful life presents its proverbial self to you?

Not exactly. Minimalism is but the vehicle in which you drive yourself towards your destination. Wherever the destination may be, it's important to remember that the practice of minimalism is not the magic bullet, the one-stop shop to reaching it.

Once you have paired down the excess, once the important things in your life are brought into sharp focus, with the physical and mental clutter gone, it is common for people to stop there. That's it done, ta-da! Easy peasy. Until they realise that a feeling of discontent remains. They feel no happier and so, once again, they start supplementing their discontent with the acquisition of material goods. The material goods they just spent weeks or months purging. Before they know it, they are back where they started.

Sound familiar? If your answer to that is yes, then chances are you have missed out the most important step. I know I did once.

You've heard the cliche that you should follow your dreams, but it's bullshit. Simply following your dreams implies that you may never actually reach them. Follow your dreams is to western society what a carrot on a stick is to a rabbit. A cruel tease at something unreachable. You might want to travel for a year, or live abroad for the next 10 years, or even retire abroad. You might want to retire at 30 and enjoy the freedom of time for the rest of your life. Or maybe you just want to be more satisfied with the things you have. Whatever your dream, following them won't necessarily bring them any closer. You need to put the work in. You need to cultivate your dream into your reality.

Someone who wants to spend their life travelling shouldn't anchor themselves with a 35-year mortgage in a leafy suburb. That would make no sense! That's certainly the conclusion that Colin Wright came to. Once upon a time, he lived a lifestyle many dream of. He was living the corporate lifestyle in Los Angeles, staying in a townhouse by the beach and earning $150,000 a year running his own branding company. But that wasn't his dream. He dreamt of travel but had never actually left the country. He described this as "a sign of his failings in a lot of ways." So he simply quit. To quote his site, "In 2009, I handed off most of my clients, sold or gave away everything I owned that wouldn't fit into carry-on luggage, and started up a blog, Exile Lifestyle." Since then, he has visited more than 60 countries and 48 US states, all while running his blog, publishing books, speaking at conferences and curating his podcast. His online endeavours results in an income of around $30,000, which may be a mere fraction of his corporate salary, but this allows him to live a life that is very deliberate and intentional and meaningful to him. None of which would have been possible had he not dropped his anchors.

For me, the objectives of minimalism is to live a meaningful life each day, to achieve financial independence and have freedom of time by my late 30s or early 40s. All of this to facilitate my dreams, to put my time and effort into things that bring me joy. I'll get to focus my efforts more on my home life, maybe even start foster caring. I could work part-time in an artisan coffee house, maybe Grain and Grind. I'd continue to write my blog. I could even pick up a professional writing gig, a weekly column. I'd love to write for Vice or Gay Times. I'd love to pay more attention to my charitable work. I'd love to volunteer at Scout Adventures Gilwell Park again, this time for a month. I'd love to spend more time planning and curating a balanced programme of activities for the young people in my section. I'd love to spend time performing reiki's of munro's and other hikes and expeditions to take them on. To do all of this, I need to cultivate these dreams into realities, not just follow them hoping one day someone will give them to me.

I know that to make these dreams a reality, I need to focus on reaching objectives that most spend their entire lives striving for. Financial independence is, after all, the state everyone must find themselves come retirement. So to get there early, I know I must have a constant focus on achieving and then over-achieving my financial goals. It won't be easy by any definition of the word. I can already tell that words like 'stingy' or 'tight' will eventually be used to describe me. I prefer frugal and deliberate. With these qualities woven throughout my life, I'm confident I can get there.

A load of extra elbow grease now will literally pay dividends when I can retire some 20-years early, when I can live the rest of my life as I see fit. For freedom of time I must focus on what is important to me and be willing to let go of the rest, freeing myself from the day-to-day value-minus activities that slowly sap my dreams from under my feet. That's the purpose of this blog really. It's my digital accountability buddy! I will document it all here, the plans and the delivery, the highs and lows, and regardless of how it goes, it's better than not trying at all. It's better to fail doing the right thing, than to succeed in doing the wrong.

~ Aedan