I love to accessorize.  I don’t mean that I love purses and shoes….( I’M A DUDE!!!!)…I just love to gear up for whatever might lie in my future path.  At this point, I should say that it’s probably not politically correct to make a gender based comment about guys that buy purses and shoes…so I’ll say “to each his own” and let it go at that.  I personally feel no need to buy any purses…and would rather buy boots than shoes.  I will end up with a drawer full of 13 mm box end wrenches from time to time…though I’m not sure how or why that happens.

So…I’ve established in a long-winded and disjointed way that I love to accessorize.  I love to prepare.  I love to gear up.  I love to defer the actual work by getting ready for the work.  I’ve realized this about myself…I put things off by making sure all my ducks are in a row.

“Not yet,” I’ll say, “almost there..soon it will be time”… and buying one more clamp or a measuring device or a different tool is going to get me to the place where starting a job is the only way left to go.  I’ve prepared myself into a corner…NOW I’ll have to start.

I see videos of guys overseas making a chest of drawers with a toothpick, a sharpened license plate, and some reconstituted coconut milk for glue.  That’s pretty darn impressive to me.  I’m not like that…I live in a developed country…and I prepare.

Looking at my sagging bookshelves I realize that , scattered among the shelves, I have way too many books about living the simple life.  I may even have books about what books to buy to help me in my quest to live the simple life. I have books about living the simple life, I have books about other people trying to live the simple life, I have books about people complaining about people who don’t live the simple life…I have a lot of books about the simple life. It is confusing to me in the end…and I don’t have time with all my reading to live simply.  It takes a lot of work to get ready to do something simple.

That doesn’t really even touch on the section about living a minimalist lifestyle.

I desire a simple life…stripped to it’s bare elements, freeing me up for family and friends, freeing me to be the kind of person I need to be to really LIVE…not just sleepwalk through my years. I tell my wife, “a pair of boardshorts, some flip-flops, 2 t-shirts, a toothbrush…that’s all I’d really need.”  I think she knows, though, that like Steve Martin in “the Jerk”, I’d be grabbing at least 10 of my “simple living” books on the way out the door.

I know that I am almost there.  There is a revised edition of the one book that will push me into action coming out in the Spring…I can hardly wait.

I will be an expert on simplicity if it takes the rest of my life.