Letting Myself Simplify and Allow Some Things Fall to the Ground

The rhythm of life right now seems to be about simplifying, culling and cutting, stripping and taking stock. It has made up much of my reading right now, having breezed through The Hyperlinked Life and then been slowly savoring my way through Notes from a Blue Bike: The Art of Living Intentionally in a Chaotic World.

Both books have been resonating with my soul and its cry to sift through my actions, my day and hold on to those things that really matter. Let the others fall loosely through my grip—and be okay with that. Sometimes the letting go, no matter how good it is for us, can be a hard thing. It can feel like giving up, like failure that we can't do it all, like disappointment.

And yet, they seem an encouragement to be willing to take those steps, to let some things fall to the ground.

The Hyperlinked Life is penned by The Barna Group, which is a Christian group that surveys people to find out what is going on in our world and how our faith fits into it. They've written some other books that I found incredibly insightful, so I was eager to get their thoughts on how technology is impacting our lives—specifically our relationships and time. There's no doubt that technology is good and here to stay, and they don't argue that at all. What they encourage is that we find ways to steward technology, to make sure we are controlling it rather than the other way around. The biggest thing they encourage is taking digital Sabbaths. Letting technology fall away from us, from our grip, for a matter of time, whether daily or weekly.


And in Notes From a Blue Bike, she looks at the act of simplifying across a bunch of different parameters, from the way you feed your family to school your children to work for a livelihood. While her "simplified" life looks very different from the way I live and envision my own, she too offers an encouragement to readers to live with intention and look at things closely and cut away the fat that, no matter how good it might taste, is weighing you down. And she shows how she's attempted to do that—sometimes to great success, other times discovering that what she once thought made her life better actually didn't.

That lesson resonated with me: Sometimes we have to reevaluate these things in our life, and I feel like that's what I've been doing here lately, taking time to breathe and pull back from this technological space. (Which is probably why I've found so much time for reading of late!)

It has felt good to not fall prey to expectations about how frequently I should post and comment and share and like and all that online jazz. It has felt good to have free time with which to just sit and not turn to my computer to fill every extra second.

And so this is the new rhythm of my life right now, one that feels right, where this blog space might be a bit more quiet than it once was. I don't expect to stop, but just to move more slowly and, hopefully, more intentionally.

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