Today via a friend’s Facebook page I came across YouTube videos about Minimalism, which rang a vague bell  in my head. The first video I looked at was how changing my environmental visuals could change my habits, and this immediately struck a chord: I sit in front of the television and eat sweets because I see them in the corner of my eye – as the presenter said, “see them, eat them.”

Looking cursorily at the presenter’s output, my immediate thought was to embrace Minimalism in its entirety, but I have the sudden insight that to do so would be conforming to the same “see it, do it” paradigm that the presenter was decrying, and with which I was agreeing.

I recognise a drifting in my photography towards minimalism, and in my attitude to culling books and unused crockery, pots, pans and more.

I have persistently and deliberately set up visuals as reminders to do things largely because of my fear of forgetting to do those things. It’s the same area of reasoning which “forces” me to do things when I think of them lest I forget and they don’t get done.

But somewhere there is a compromise to be had. I could remove the “unproductive” visuals but retain the ones that are necessary to my mental comfort and indeed to my lifestyle.

And now I’m wondering how this applies to the rest of my functioning, particularly the various “projects” which I continually invent and write down lest I forget them, and then feel guilty because I haven’t done them.

Of course, creating “projects” is not a bad thing, and what I really need to tackle is my constant failure to get on do anything, my procrastination and what I have to call my laziness and inertia.

So here I am, 1215 on a Sunday when the only item to my diary is the Evening Prayer Zoom Service, having woken late (not a bad thing given my habitual insomnia), having watched an episode of The Crown, having fiddled about with my diary to reflect the calendar for waste disposal through the coming year, then touching on this subject of Minimalism. What to do now? It’s almost lunchtime, and I am hungry. I want to continue reading my book on logos and branding (as well as other books which embarrassingly I have on the go). I want to explore my new interest in Minimalism…

Time to be decisive. First, find and record references for the Minimalism discussion. Then lunch watching some TV. Perhaps an hour on my logos book, and then begin to see how I should fill the time before 1800 when I leave the service.

At the end of writing this, a sort of brain dump, I decided to post it as a blog entry so that I can come back to it easily, a reminder – visual? – of my wish to explore Minimalism.