You could go crazy trying to simplify your life. Don’t waste your time.

Everyone seems to want to simplify, to cut out extraneous influences and turn off the incessant bombardment of the outside world. We want balance, and we bemoan our society’s frenetic pace as if there were once an easier time when balance and simplicity were the norm.

Forget it. There was never an easier time.

(You think email is bad? How would you like to be spending hours every night hand writing–and then copying–letters to people in order to keep them in the loop on important goings on in your life? Did I mention you were doing this by candle light, using a quill you had to sharpen by hand? Or that you were sitting on a less-than-ergonomic bench? And that you had to wait weeks or sometimes even months for a response? Was your son still alive after his bought with small pox? You’d stress for weeks waiting to hear, and in the meantime, you were wondering how much you should share with him, since you yourself weren’t feeling so hot!)

For all the ink spilled on work/life balance issues, true success requires that you forget everything you ever read about the subject. There has never been an easier time. Maybe one is coming, but I’m not holding my breath.

The time is for inner peace is now.

You even know what to do already to achieve peace, and how to do it: Go online to orbitz.com… buy plane tickets to Hawaii… OR, create work you are passionate about and throw yourself into it; surround yourself with friends you care about and jettison those you don’t really like (or who don’t really like you); focus on your significant other and make your relationship with that person the top priority in your life; and if you have kids, get to know them and find things to like about them so you enjoy spending time with them. Put blinders on to the BS. Make your world binary: either you care enough about a subject to engage and do something, or you don’t even care enough to discuss it, and eliminate the middle ground.

That’s the plan. Pretty simple. If you do this, whatever you do, wherever you are, you’ll be doing something that is meaninful, with people who matter to you. The concepts of balance and simplicity change completely when you are juggling passions instead of obligations.

Here’s the thing: I bet you know all this already. The question really isn’t what to do. It is, why don’t you do it?

I can’t answer this question for you; that requires skills I don’t (yet) have. But I can tell you why I don’t always get this passions vs. obligations thing right. For one thing, I don’t always think of creating my life’s passion, I think of findingit, and that puts me in a negative/lacking state of mind as opposed to a positive/empowered one. For another thing, friends take a long time to make, and it’s not always clear if a transgression is a sign of a bigger issue, a one time thing, or evidence of a phase that will pass, so it’s not always clear when or where to draw the line. Also, sometimes people are bound to you through relationships–such as in-laws, friends of friends, and coworkers–who cause you grief but who can’t be jettisoned so easily. In those cases, it’s not a question of passion vs. obligation, it’s a question of passions coming with obligations; in those cases, your loyalties can get tested a lot.

So what I try to do to get around these issues is, I stay focused on the goal of surrounding myself with passions (whether things or people) instead of obligations, and I let the day-to-day take care of itself. I try not to over think things, I just look to find the positive in the moment. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and I’m starting to see dividends. I’m more patient, more extroverted, and more likable–I mean I like me more now–and I’m able to relax faster when stressed. I laugh at myself a lot more, too, instead of laughing at others.

I’m far from perfect and have a long way to go in the execution department, but I’m already seeing a difference just by carrying this philosophy around… enough of a difference to believe that I’m on the right track with this.

Give it a shot. What do you have to lose?

Posted under Self-Development, Personal, How to Self-Destruct