Keurig and Karaoke

Today’s thought was a tough one only because I have so very many things weighing on my mind and heart this week it was hard to single out just one. There’s a word for that—confusion—yes, that’s it. I’ve had a lot of confusion lately and confusion is never a comfortable state of being, is it?

And to add insult to injury, if I have any natural gifts (which around here is an ongoing matter of debate) then one of them would definitely be what some call “connectedness,” or to put it another way, the ability to perceive connections between seemingly disparate things. I’m the “because a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon a hurricane hits the east coast” guy. Someone like me never has to have a religion tell me that “everything is one.” For me that’s just Tuesday.

Now, true confessions, this connectedness thing is one of the reasons why as a designer it sometimes looks like I’m pulling off magic tricks when I come into your home and “solve” the riddle of your design problems. One of my clients was just talking about this. You invite me in to somehow make the kitchen better and a half an hour later I’m standing in the driveway trying to explain why the real issue is the mailbox is the wrong color.

So here’s the problem with connectedness. It’s about juggling a lot of information all at the same time. And when there are a lot of balls in the air it doesn’t take much for order to turn to confusion. And when that happens I, the connectedness guy, I need to throttle back the information flow. It’s probably why Tina and I live, and revel in living, such an intentionally simple, and fairly quiet life. For us, less is usually better. Less is always more.

And I fully admit, such statements reflect first world problems. So I’m trying not to whine about it but I do need to do something about it. Only in times of great abundance do we find ourselves invoking the phrase, “Less is more.”

“Less is more” is all about choosing quality over quantity. It’s about throttling down, filtering, focusing. Is it really any surprise that with the advent of the Information Age came the advent of the Attention Deficit age? Tapping the brakes may be our next great cultural hurdle.

We have this little local newspaper called the Acorn that gets dropped on our driveway. I enjoy reading it over breakfast. Reading newsprint makes me feel like I’m living in a simpler time. The Acorn is only about 12 pages cover to cover, and it struck me this week that before I finished my coffee I actually got to the last page … and then that was it. No more news. The End. It’s as if this little paper was giving me permission to put it down and move on.

That’s not the world we live in. Pick any topic and you can literally fill your life 24/7 with nothing but new information about it. That’s amazing, but it can so quickly consume us.