Learning the old ways.
I’m watching a Ryan Carson’s video in which he explains how he implements Dasvid Allen’s Getting Things Done. Good stuff all of it! But. He just finished a solid minute on the rubberband on his paper todo lists and now he’s describing his pen, of all things, and I’m sort of chuckling about how much time he’s spending on the mundania. Then it strikes me – I’m so inculcated in the complexity of my life, complexity added on by, what? By my culture? I don’t know. But I’m so steeped in this tradition of complexity that I actually need to study this stuff. This stuff about how to make choices in favor of low-drag tools, low-friction life. I have to learn to choose a simple pen instead of a nine-color, big fat thing that’s important to have because I might need all those colors one day. Wow.
I idealize farmers and carpenters, masons, barbers, etc. – tradesmen – of old in this sense, I think they all just knew how to make simple choices. Maybe their apparent simplicity came from having only limited choices. They didn’t have the 9-color pen versus the stub-pencil choice. They could only afford the stub pencil. Whatever, it idealistic of me and surely inaccurate, but I use that idealism to try to get a grasp on making choices these days in favor of simplicity.
But it’s hard, hard, hard sometimes. Hard to let go of the 9-color pens. Hard to trust myself that I’ll be okay with just the little pen. That I don’t need to carry around my PC tools all the time – if I need one, chances are it’ll be when I’m on a job and I’ll have known to bring them.