jackcheng:

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A few years ago, a friend shared with me his strategy for decluttering his home. He and his wife lived in a duplex and decided to gather every single thing they had and put it in the bottom level of the duplex. They moved upstairs, lived in just the top level, and as they needed something, they would go downstairs, find it, and bring it up. Little by little, they repopulated their life with only what was necessary.

I was thinking about this strategy today, and I realized it works because if you have something at hand to begin with, you can come up with a bunch of reasons to keep it, whereas if you start without it and have to go out of your way to get it, you have to ask a different question. Instead of asking, “Why should I keep this thing?” You ask, “What thing do I need here?”

I also realized today that I use this same strategy when I write.

Think of the rough draft as the initial hoarding: you have just moved into your house and you’ve gathered all this junk and written down everything in your head and the whole place is messy and cluttered. You start there, and then you move upstairs. You create a separate document or version and begin anew, with a blank page, a basic outline, the essential furniture. You leave all the clever sentences and paragraphs downstairs, and you won’t miss them, and the ones that you do bring back are the ones that fill a need; the ones that fit.

What I’d like to say to all of you is that you are all going to die… You have, in fact, already begun to die. You look great, don’t get me wrong. And you are youth and beauty. You are at the physical peak. Your bodies have just gotten off the ski slope on the peak of growth, potential, and now comes the black diamond mogul run to the grave. And the weird thing is your body wants to die. On a cellular level, that’s what it wants. And that’s probably not what you want.

I’m confronted by a great deal of grand and worthy ambition from this student body. You want to be a politician, a social worker. You want to be an artist. Your body’s ambition: mulch. Your body wants to make some babies and then go in the ground and fertilize things. That’s it. And that seems like a bit of a contradiction. It doesn’t seem fair. For one thing, we’re telling you, “Go out into the world!” exactly when your body is saying, “Hey, let’s bring it down a notch. Let’s take it down.”

And that’s actually what I’d like to talk to you about. The contradiction between your body and your mind, between your mind and itself. I believe these contradictions and these tensions are the greatest gift that we have.