On NPR the other day I heard Graham Hill talking about the project LifeEdited [1]. That prompted me to watch his TED talk about his idea, “Edit Your Life.” [2] Hill talks about his own efforts to edit his living space, and proposes how much simpler, and, surprisingly, better, our lives might be if we made do with a lot less.
His premise is straightforward. He suggests that we edit ruthlessly, “clear the arteries of our lives,” cut the extraneous, and stem inflow.
As a culture, we have become obsessed with more. Although today Americans have much more space than 50 years ago, Hill says, a monstrous self-storage industry has emerged in this country. Advertising has made it clear: More is better, and your identity is largely determined by your possessions. I wonder if a primary trait of current child-raising is building covetousness.
But then we look around and in the midst of all of our stuff we ourselves are nowhere to be found.
It’s an intriguing idea, to have a conscious effort to simplify as a means to happiness, and I think of those I know who have a beautiful simplicity to their endeavors. Simple homes. Modest vacations. Subdued birthday parties for their kids. Even streamlined relationships. These people seem happier in so many ways. We live in a time when “it’s complicated,” but is that complication a choice?
Life editing got me, a writing teacher, also thinking about the actual editing we do when writing. (By the way, my preference would be to use the word “revising” instead, but “editing” works okay here because the focus is on reduction.) A fundamental lesson about writing is that you should write long and then cut. Skilled, experienced writers, most of them, know that writing is about revising and cutting. It’s better to write long and then go through the difficult, sometimes painful, process of cutting, weeding out, reducing. The text takes its shape from all of this excess material. In the archives of the writing history of successful writers are millions of discarded words. It’s the nature of the business. You take a look and cut, viciously and thoroughly.
A life edit would require similarly aggressive cutting, and the consequential pleasure of it. Indeed, pleasure. Hill suggests most of us can think of times when we experience of “the joys of less,” which include more freedom and more time. “Let’s make room for the good stuff,” he says. This careful reduction may not just be of possessions, but simplifying the static of incoming information, of desires, of complexity.
It strikes me as a fascinating exercise to take the body of your life’s experience and edit. Take your baseline of experiences, things, and even thoughts, and see what you could do with fewer of each. It would be difficult, for sure. It might even be scary, because as you cut away, you’d realize that you’d be getting closer to your actual self.
Fortunately, most of us already have a nice head start on this process, because, like skilled writers, we already have the massive text: We have developed/accumulated a life text that is overflowing, flabby, verbose. By using the eye of an editor, we might shape that mass down to, what Hill says, is the “good stuff.”
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[5]Scott Warnock [6]
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