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(Photo: Katie@!) I’d like to wrap up the year with one of my favorite haikus, by Matsuo Basho: Year’s end, all The activities and accoutrements of the holiday season can sometimes be overwhelming, and I love the idea of finishing the year with a clean slate. Let’s take these final days [...] One of the central tenets of Zen Buddhism is the concept of mujo. Mujo means impermanence, transience, ephemerality—in other words, everything is changing in every moment, nothing ever stays the same. As minimalists, why is it so important that we get our mujo on? Because when we see that everything is impermanent, we become less attached [...] (Photo: Helene Samson) I’ve always been fascinated by the philosophical aspects of world religions. As I mentioned in a previous post, I see many more commonalities among different doctrines than I see differences—and one of those happens to be their emphasis on simple living. Across the board, the great spiritual leaders were not known for [...] I spent last New Year’s Day in Bangkok, participating in the Thai tradition of visiting Buddhist temples and making donations to the resident monks. At one of the temples, a monk blessed me with a sprinkle of holy water and tied a simple white cord around my wrist. Eight months later, I’m still wearing it. I’ve [...] I’ve always been a big fan of haiku, the ultra-compact poetry of Japanese tradition. I appreciate its elegant form, its economy of expression, and its emphasis on limits: 17 syllables total, in lines of 5, 7, and 5. Here’s a few of my favorites from the wandering poet Basho (of course, the English translations differ in [...] (Photo: mctroutman) Yesterday, the property manager of my current sublet told me she’d be showing the place to potential tenants that afternoon. (We’re only here for the summer, as we don’t want to sign the required one-year lease.) I feel awkward hanging around during showings, so I planned to take my iPod Touch to [...] Kaori, a reader from Tokyo, left a very thought-provoking comment on last week’s Real Life Minimalist post. I know that many of you don’t subscribe to the RSS Comments feed; therefore, I thought I’d share it in today’s post in case you missed it: hi. I’m writing from Tokyo, Japan where as a city we’re having [...] (Photo: phocks) A few weeks ago, while researching my post on areté, I tripped across another interesting concept from classical Greece: sophrosyne. Sophrosyne (pronounced suh-FROSS-uh-nee, if you’d like to impress your friends) is an ancient ideal involving healthy-mindedness, balance, and moderation. As you can imagine, I was immediately intrigued. According to Wikipedia, sophrosyne “is [...] I’ve been interviewed countless times over the past year, and frequently asked “What is minimalism?” More often than not, the reporter is looking for something dramatic, something newsworthy, something extreme. And more often than not, my answer disappoints them. Why? Because in my opinion, minimalism is not about being radical or awesome or extraordinary. It’s not about [...] Back in college, I had a thing for Greek philosophers. While my peers were obtaining more practical knowledge in business, engineering, and the like, I was reading Plato and Aristotle and pondering the meaning of life. My fling with these ancient thinkers was pushed to the backburner when I graduated, however; after all, I had more [...] |
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