“Less is More” Is Underrated
And I have just realised this
Its a rainy evening in July. I feel like my mind is cluttered with a million thoughts. Not sure what the thoughts are but it’s a mess up there. I am cranky and showing attitude to my mom who is just asking me what I want to eat. Immediately after doing so, I realise that I am projecting my irritated self on other people. But why am I irritated? Maybe I need a walk, I tell myself. I go down for a walk in the rain. It’s the most beautiful Bangalore weather that everybody who stays in Bangalore can never seem to stop talking about. I put on my earphones and try to just walk around and listen to some of my favourite tunes. No, it’s not helping me, I realise that the songs are playing but I am not listening to them. My mind is still scattered. I put on a few podcasts, try to feed in some meditative or informative content to my already confused brain. I am asking myself, why am I feeling this way? I have no answers.
Sometimes we just feel a particular way and it becomes so hard to pin point to what is causing it. And sometimes we know what’s causing it, but there is nothing that can be done to stop it.
As I am growing older I am realising the meaning behind the phrase , “less is more”. If i think about few examples from my personal life, every time I have had a lot of options and felt spoiled for choice. – I have always struggled or picked something randomly. Often afterwards not feeling very grateful or joyful that I had these many options and the final one turned out great. It’s usually the other way around. When there are less choices or less options, I seem to be choosing one carefully and be captivated by the choice I made. This can be as simple as deciding what show to watch when there are thousands of shows available on our finger tips. But think of the time when we hardly had choices. It was either “Art attack” on Disney or “Tom and Jerry” on Cartoon Network. We spent more time watching this than speculating what to watch.
I think about the times when my dad’s given me a small piece of chocolate. For some reason, that’s always tasted far better than when I have had an entire bar or two of chocolates to myself.
When it comes down to the most important things in our lives, less is more. The fact that it is less, makes us cherish it and value it. In the end, we can have all the distractions and fancy things in life. But the feeling of “being lost” or “feeling scattered” will persist unless we really dig deep and look at the most basic things that actually matter.
And that’s how it’s working now. We as humans, first made a billion gadgets and techniques of complicating our lives and adding more layers to it. And now we are trying to go in reverse again and get back to the most basic form by “simplifying” the things we overcomplicated in the first place.
It’s a challenge to be yourself in a world that is trying to make you everything else but yourself.
In the whole process of dealing with multiple things and the thousands of thoughts that cross our minds everyday, we forget who we are. Our routine keeps going on and on with no purpose and connection to our self. It’s absolutely necessary that we align our inner self to a purpose and revisit it time after time to know who we are. To feed the “less” in us. It could be a simple self talk, podcast, yoga,meditation or journaling. These are all fancy terms today but these used to be just the simplest parts of peoples lives before instead of some form of achievement or a thing to boast about.
Here is to hoping this sort of “scattered” article with my unfiltered thoughts, was relatable to some of the people reading this. What do you think about this?
