There is an amazing clarity of vision that people get at certain times. Someone whose house has just burned down will say that the only truly important thing was that no lives were lost. Someone who knows they are dying gains great acuity about what’s important in life and what’s not.

But most of us, most of the time, are wandering around in a kind of mire. We might think that we’re doing our best, but what are we doing? Our best at what?

Sometimes, perhaps often, we should stop. Come to a full and utter stop for a period of time so that we can truly look at ourselves, our lives, what we’re spending our time on, if we’re honouring our passions and realising our dreams.

Honouring our passions. Many of us don’t even recognise our passions any more. We’re so entrenched in our working lives, domestic chores, things that we ‘have’ to do that we not only don’t do something concrete towards our passions, we don’t even know what they are any more.

This is the time for subtraction, not addition. Clarity of vision comes from having less in your life, not more. Paring down physical possessions can help. Lessening the amount your eyes look at and therefore your brain has to process is a brilliant idea. Having routines that work on autopilot can also be helpful. Your brain can rest from the minutia, the dross, and in doing so has the energy for more important work.

Getting clarity on what you spend your time thinking about is another step in the right direction. If you spend a great deal of your time thinking, “They should” or “I wish” then you are wasting your precious resource in an utterly stupid way. Of course, most of us do it and we don’t know how to stop. That doesn’t make it less stupid.

We spend a great deal of time doing unimportant things. Once we’ve pruned the television and the computer time, we can look around and truly evaluate what we spend our days doing. It’s fairly likely that we’ll find huge blocks of time that, if not exactly wasted, could be freed up with just a little thought or a new way of doings things. I’m not really thinking about getting more efficient, here. Rather, of finding ways to do a little less on an ongoing basis so our minds have time to spend on important things.

I certainly don’t want to get to the end of my life and wonder why I didn’t spend a bit of time working out what were the truly important things in my life … and doing them.

Paring down to a manageable level is an interesting exercise. I have been reading about it for years and I have certainly released many kilograms of unneeded items. Not quite so many kilograms have come in through the door, so I’m counting that as a small win.

I love the clean lines of minimalism but I would not say I was the minimalist type. I’ve always been sentimental. I still have gifts people gave me 30 or 40 years ago. These people  are no longer in my life but I treasure their gifts anyway. I have a great swathe of hanging clothes (not all of which I wear) and some packed away, including costumes from my dancing childhood. I have the evidence of old hobbies. I have aspirational clutter. I have bought items for the nebulous ‘when I have time’ and I hold on to them because one day I know – at least, I think – I will use them.

But the greatest help to me in getting my household under some control (admittedly it’s a work in progress) is the knowledge that I can part with things that I don’t use. That it’s okay to do so. This knowledge has been a very long time coming. Overcoming possession guilt is a weird and convoluted business, but one reason I am managing it is that I have been gradually going through my mother’s gigantic packing shed and tiny house.

I decided on an onion-like approach. First I would go through and throw out just rubbish – the outer layer that I knew was utterly worthless. Unbelievably, that probably halved the stuff in the shed, which gave me some hope that I would be able to accomplish the overwhelming task I had set myself. I have to thank the council for doing a hard rubbish collection because that made it possible to get rid of big items like the dead fridge, broken furniture and other sizeable articles that are otherwise hard to get to leave the premises. This gave me some more little clearings in the corridors that had been made.

The next layer of the onion was stuff from the past that I knew held no great emotional hold and was simply the result of delayed decisionmaking. I opened a giant box that I think a freezer must have come in, and realised it had never been opened since being packed to move more than 30 years before. There were some useable items in there – probably two apple boxes worth of clean stationery. 1978 diaries, anyone? Yes, I know the days and dates correspond with one of the years we’re having soon, but probably not 10 of them. Of course, they can be used for notepaper … but as always with this kind of hoarding, there is enough notepaper for three people’s lifetimes.

I have come to the conclusion that it is sad not to recognise when things need to be let go. If you have a lot of space available, you can keep things for an unconscionable time but it doesn’t benefit you in any way. Of course it’s fun to keep some of it. Look at the wages they were getting in 1966. Oh look, here’s a shilling. Must have been before February 1966, then. But the fun bits are few and far between and there’s a lot of hefting and decision making to do amongst it. Better to have a box of treasures and have all the fun without any of the pain, surely?

The onion was looking much better by now. Very tatty, because I did’t really organise too much as I went, but decidedly smaller. It was getting harder to fill the garbage bin each time I went to do an hour or two on the mammoth project. But then I discovered the $20 rule. If you would be able to replace it, today, for $20 or less and you can’t really see a need for it in the very near future, that item can be released (to the bin or the charity shop, depending what it is) and the decision making process is done. You don’t have to worry about that item ever, ever again. It’s gone. And if you find you might need it, you simply replace it at the time you require it. That gets rid of about 1000 items that you might find a use for some day. If you have done this step assiduously, you will have to put your hand in your pocket to replace the two or three items that you might actually use over the next 10 or 20 years. Sixty dollars well spent (in the future), I think. And if you don’t have to spend 16 hours looking for an item, well, that’s a bonus. The truth is that people don’t usually spend too long looking. They just go out and buy another one, so there’s an opportunity cost either way.

Throwing out the rubbish that my mother collected over 80 years has been an interesting exercise because it has strengthened a muscle that I had never used and I now at least look at my own items more honestly. If I don’t use something, then really, why do I have it? Old technology, broken items, excess amounts … they don’t make my life any better. They actually weigh me down a little because everything I own has to be touched at some time to be moved, cleaned and placed back. Why? To move, clean and put back again next time I am cleaning this area?

So the value of a thing has become more about its value to me today than its importance in my life in the past (to an extent – I’m not totally reformed). I don’t have to believe in the fairytale that it’s still worth something to me just because I have owned it and lugged it through two moves or it’s always been sitting on that particular shelf in the bookcase. If it has value to someone else, well and good – I’ll give it away. I’m not really a reseller. I have been given tonnes of stuff over my lifetime (the house has been witness to that) and have parted with very little in comparison to the incomings. Now it is my turn to be the giver, so I can stay away from the buy, swap and sell places – physical and digital – and simply gift my stuff to someone else through the kind services of an op shop.

An interesting observation is this: I don’t think I could have done this if I hadn’t started with the pure rubbish at my mother’s place. I don’t think I could have skipped straight to paring down the items that might have some use in the future or have some use to someone else. I have needed time to  process the ‘why’ of it all. Originally, I suppose I thought my mother must have had a good reason for keeping all this stuff and that to some extent I copied her without asking the important question. Well, there really isn’t a good reason for keeping rubbish. And throwing out the pure crap releases something inside you that makes it possible to look at the rest with new eyes.

I am slowly continuing to clear boxes and shelves of nearly worthless articles, kept for decades for nebulous reasons, perhaps simply from the lack of motivation to go through it. I can understand that. This process takes a lot of time and energy. I have only managed what I have by picking away at it. There have been many consecutive weeks where I have put out the council bin full, only to get so busy that I allow a month to slide by without throwing away a single plastic bag.

Looking around my own house, I doubt that you would know that all this has been going on in my brain. I’m sure it doesn’t look like your idea of a pared down house. I’m equally sure it would have been a hundred times quicker if I had gone through and decided on the things to keep, rather than the things to get rid of. That’s a different mindset and I think that as I continue this path I may get there. But at the moment I am still doing it the back-to-front way that most people have used all their lives. And even if it’s not perfect, it is saving me from drowning in stuff in the meantime.

There are two schools of thought for how tasks should be done. One is that you should block out a reasonable amount of time and see the task through to the end. The other is that you should do a bit, even if you  have limited time and you know you won’t be able to finish in that session.

I belong to both schools. I love the thought of seeing the task through to completion. The lawn mowed, whippersnipped, gear put away and hoses and pot plants put back in their places. But sometimes you simply don’t have the time and that’s when the ‘just start’ rule comes into play. Get something done, even if it’s not everything. If you can stop in a place where your half-finished task still looks reasonable, in my book that’s okay. It’s a mini-task, if you will. The bigger job is broken into doable bites and if you need to do the chore over two days, then so be it. Otherwise, the job would linger on the to do list. Indeed, it might languish there!

Of course, some chores seem to stay undone for far too long and when we do them we realise that we put off the simplest little task and it was only 10 minutes’ work. I do that with items like trouser hems that have come undone in the wash. But I have a plan that fits in with my tolerance level for out-of-place items. Rather than adding the item of clothing to a big mending basket that has been put in a cupboard and may never get done, I leave the offending item out in plain sight … somewhere that I don’t usually have anything sitting.  The theory is that the placement of the item will encourage me to do this one thing. It may take some time to work, but it does eventually. I look at the item as I go past until one day I think, oh for goodness’ sake just fix that thing. (This only works with an otherwise tidy space, by the way.) And that’s when I learn, all over again, how little time some of these tasks take when you settle in and do them.

Sometimes a simple little job is seemingly made more difficult because the tools are not handy. That one is easy. Commit to breaking the job up into the three segments: Preparation, doing the chore and putting away. The minute I put a sewing kit next to the mending I am a leap closer to doing the job. And I always put away as soon as I have done the chore because the energy created from having completed a task makes the putting-away part easy.

The funny thing is that over the years, repetitive chores like washing up and other household duties have become almost automatic and I have a fairly consistent work ethic that just gets these things done. For example, I wash up as I cook, in those spare seconds I have between chopping and stirring. I might only wash two items at a time but I leave the next in the hot sudsy water and it takes almost no time to do when I get back to it. And by the rinse-and-repeat methodology I usually find that the after-dinner washing up will only be the final pots and the crockery and cutlery from the meal. I immediately finish the washing up as soon as I get up from the table so it’s all done almost without thinking about it. If I ever deviate from this pattern, the washing up is a chore that I hate. And don’t tell me to get a dishwasher, because we all know that there are still rinsing and packing duties involved and some people have trouble with that too.

Over time I have made these habits work for me. It’s the little extra jobs where I have to find techniques and tricks to make things happen, and the single decision of always taking each task to the next possible action (shades of one of the guiding principles in Getting Things Done) means that procrastination is overcome to a large degree.

And my powerful mantra is a simple, underwhelming little phrase … I’ll just make a start.

Big ships take a lot of effort and a huge amount of space to turn around. It’s a bit the same when you’re fat. It all seems to be taking too much time to make a considerable difference in your weight so you lose heart and give up the attempt. Then, a little while later when the pain of that failure is a little dimmed, you start the whole process again.

So you’re not progressing full steam ahead – or full steam backwards – you’re wallowing around in very large circles.

Make no mistake, changing from being overweight to the right size is a mammoth undertaking. It’s a project all its own, with its own particular challenges. You have to set your course and commit 100 per cent to the undertaking so that you are travelling full steam ahead no matter what the weather.

Unbelievably, the next part – remaining at the right weight – is even harder. If we stay with the ship analogy, it’s like trying to sit at exactly the same co-ordinates in the middle of a stormy sea. Instead of treading water, you can end up somewhere you don’t want to be. Again.

So losing weight is a two-step process – the inital big effort (which may take a year or more) and the subsequent – and constant – activity of course correction. They both require the use of a compass. They also both require attentiveness and effort. Ships do not travel without the direction of the captain and the good work of his crew.

The mistake we make is that when we’ve dropped all the weight, we think the race is run. It’s not. Unbelievably, that’s actually the easy bit because it has an end. A goal. You are seeing result and the small successes spur you on. You’re heading in the right direction. But once you’re there, the challenge seems to be over. You’ve made it. You’re in dock.

But you’re not. You’re still at sea with all the dangers still surrounding you. And now you’re a smaller vessel that can be more easily buffeted by storms.

So once you get to your right weight, your right co-ordinates, remember that you’re not safely docked. You’re still in the middle of the ocean and you need to keep your wits about you. Use  your compass constantly to stay the same weight. Make sure your attention is always on the food you eat. And practise course correction every time your weight strays even the smallest amount. Because you don’t want to be a big ship. Being sleek and lightweight and able to move quickly trhough life is a joy that’s worth making an effort to sustain.

When I was young, I idolised my very much older brother. So much so that I recall he once said something to me about the way I wouldn’t eat my watermelon right down to the white part and it hurt me so much that I decided, there and then, never to eat watermelon again. Note that I didn’t decide to simply eat it right down to the quick as he was suggesting I should!

I must have liked watermelon because I don’t remember ever eating anything I didn’t like without a fair amount of turmoil. But, click, just like that I turned off the receptor that said watermelon was an acceptable food. It has to be said that watermelon has passed my lips in the intervening years – mixed into fruit salad, for example, when it would be a little difficult to single it out and leave it in the bowl – but really I have steered clear of it for more than 40 years on, basically, a whim.

Why am I dredging up about this long-ago piece of unimportance? Because I have realised there is a little gem hidden in its depths that sometimes evades us. And that is, it’s not always as difficult as we think to delete something from our lives. Really. Sometimes it’s a case of the decision being made when the emotional environment is exactly right. There is no further angst, no affirmations required, no need to think about it deeply ever again. From that moment on, it’s just the new normal.

Perhaps we can replicate that accidental success I had when the emotions of the moment made the decision stick so easily. We can spend a little time delving into our emotions and getting them to work for us in a way that helps move us towards our aspirations.

Food for thought. And at least you don’t have to spit out the pips.

Every time this thought crosses my mind, it comes to me as if it has something new within it – a fresh element or at least a different nuance. Our lives, starting with our thoughts, revolve around perception. The Smiths might want bigger and better and more, because they see that the Joneses have that. The Smiths think the Joneses are happier, more successful, richer. (The Joneses might be on the bones of their arse, co-existing because it’s easier than separating and always fighting over how to deal with a credit card debt that Evil Kinevel couldn’t jump over.) The Smiths might spend much of their lives wanting what the Joneses seem to have, only to have their perceptions shaken when they travel and see others who have smaller and inferior and less – and yet are happier.

Then there’s the ever-present issue of judgement. It’s very hard to get past the stage where you judge what people think of you by what you think of them. In a meeting, you might have fleeting thoughts that colour the way you answer people when they ask a question.  I’ve had a run-in with that person before and I just know that he is thinking. I can see it on his face! Reality could be quite different. He could be thinking about the fight he had with his wife this morning, worrying about the indigestion that he can’t seem to shift, brooding about the dangerous antics of a crazed driver on the way to workor even mentally practising the times table. He could be thinking about very little and his face has just settled into a pensive look. Have you ever taken something the wrong way because you were expecting a certain reaction from a certain person? No? Never?

Who knows, really, what other people are thinking? Even if they share their thoughts it’s likely that some editing will occur in the telling.

So our perceptions have very little to do with actuality. With reality. With truth.

It’s more like politics. We put our spin on everything to make it fit into our world, whatever that is. To make it make sense – to us, at least. But in doing so we are living a fairytale, a story … a lie. We are forever working on an image of our life, our world, complete with our own filters and enhancements. Just the fact that there are eternal optimists and pessimists should have given us a hint long ago that we all colour the world we live in by our thoughts.

Perhaps perception is humanity’s fatal flaw and we cannot totally change because this is the way we have always operated. Still, there would be great value in recognising that the thoughts we have are not based on actuality. If we could truly grasp this, our world might shift on its axis a ilttle and nothing would ever be the same again. That’s my perception of the issue, anyway.

It’s strange that all my life I have hated running. As a child, I couldln’t really run. Any attempt always felt slow and heavy, as if the air had suddenly turned to treacle with sticky tentacles that attached to only me to slow me down and make running 10 times harder for me than it was for others … like in those dreams where you’re running and running, but not getting anywhere.

Recently, however, I have found myself doing a short sprint when coming back up the small hill after feeding the horse. Almostly thoughtlessly. Just because I feel like it. Or to be more precise, because my body does.

An interesting phenomenon was the one instance where I felt super light, my legs pumping effortlessly under me and a brief, euphoric explosion of joy inside my body—this is what they all talk about. This is why people run.

Brief. Gone. Hasn’t returned. But if I’ve done it even once I have within me the ability to do it again. To feel it again. So something that I had totally written off as not part of my life experience is looking possible for the very first time.

It’s not just because I weigh less than I have in years. I have been light before—considerably lighter than now, in fact. So what’s different? Why now? Or how now? I’m not even sure of the question I  am asking, just that there is a question.

I know there’s a possibility that sprinting for a few dozen steps doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things … but what if it’s an indication of change within me on a cellular level? That starts to look pretty exciting, doesn’t it?

I’ve always thought that even though I’ve been an abject failure at it, sprinting is something that mankind is built to do. Primitive man depended on fight or flight, and of course the age-old balance problem from only having two legs doesn’t apply when you’re at speed, because running relies on your body being off balance.

If you saw me doing my little sprint, you might think me ungainly or at the least not really a sprinter, with no technique and no true speed. I don’t see me that way at all. I am moving with the most speed I have ever attained in more than 50 years and I’m doing it as part of an almost automatic response to my body. I don’t see that as a few quick steps—for me, it’s a huge leap. More like a bloody miracle, really.

The best exercise you can ever do is to push yourself away from the table.

That old saying may once have been true, but these days many people do not eat at the table—or at least, not all the time. Breakfast might be quick mouthfuls taken while you’re rushing around doing other things or while you’re sitting in the train on the way to work, a snack might be consumed on the go or while working on the computer, eating in the car might be the norm and watching TV from the couch might signal munchie time. You can eat standing, sitting or even lying down.

The problem with the lack of ritual is that every moment of the day becomes possible food time. In previous eras, there were set times for meals, and maybe morning/afternoon tea. People simply didn’t eat outside those times.

Habit is a powerful friend or a formidable foe. Even if we are not loathe to change our ways when it comes to the food we eat, we stil have to overcome the strength and tyranny of habit. Still, it can be done. Perhaps slowly, perhaps all at once. Some people find success in clearing the decks and starting new with a regime that they put a huge amount of energy into at the start to create new habits. Some like to change more gradually. First get breakfast right, then move on to the mid-morning snack (if eating mid-morning at all), then perhaps weeks later, look at lunch.

The all-at-once way can be harder … and easier. Harder because it’s a big change which you have to manage successfully and put a huge amount of effort into initially. Easier because you don’t have the slow torture of trying to change inch by inch only to find your willpower has become won’tpower while you were concentrating on something else. So you might have more success with the big change. Make the decision, put your heart into it, and give it everything you’ve got. Make some rules for yourself and stick to them.

One of the reasons that giving up the all-day breakfast for proper mealtimes works is that your brain automatically trains itself not to think about food so much. If you’re not going to eat again until lunch time, what’s the use of even contemplating it until then? Food becomes linked to certain times of the day and you can forget about it outside those periods. If you’ve been a grazer, food has been available through many moments during your day. By removing that, you might find that you have a great deal more time and energy for other tasks.

You can become more mindful of what you are consuming when you have set times and a set place to eat. Clear away the distractions and concentrate only on your meal. Enjoy the ritual of meal times. Food is vital  to your continued existence, so give it the importance and the thought that it deserves. Doing this creates natural iimitations on what you eat and allows you to truly see what and how much you are eating.

So don’t just count calories. Make other things count as well. Choose set times and places for consuming proper meals and see how you can use the advantages of limits in your quest for good health.

On those years when I do manage to make a new year’s resolution at all, invariably the resolution pops its head up a couple of months after everyone else has made their time-honoured list … and probably even broken or forgotten some of their promises. And perhaps because I come late to the table and the resolution seems to choose me rather than the other way around, I have just one resolution.

This year my resolution comes to me nearly half a year late. I certainly can’t be accused of being an early adopter! And for someone who uses 10 words when one will do, I think it’s ironic that I can find one word to describe my entire resolution. Last year it was light. This time, it is kindness.

Such a simple word, yet such a vast impact that it could have on all our lives if we were to internalise what it is to be kind.

With kindness as our foundation, we can make the people around us happier and more secure. Think about how you would feel knowing that someone close to you was never going to lay blame, find fault in a carping way or simply say something just to be a bit mean. Being the recipient of kindness is certainly not a burden!

Now think about being the person from whom the kindness is emanating. You are set free from worrying about whose fault something is. The kind way needs no opinion on that but can immediately steer towards a positive outcome, dealing with the situation with a gentleness that makes everything easier.

I am in a life situation now where kindness would be a wonderful trait to have and of course the realisation quickly follows that any situation can be made better with kindness.

For me it means slowing down a little, being more thoughtful on a moment-by-moment basis, being present and responsive to the person I want to be rather than unconsciously saying whatever pops into my mind. Over time, I am sure that better words will come to me of their own volition but at the moment I need to train them. And I need to become comfortable with the little hiatus that will surely occur between my habit-driven thoughts and words … and those of the higher self that I now want to choose.

I have many, many moments in the day when I can use my resolution and I’m sure that if I can get to that place where kindness is my automatic response rather than the occasional impatience, frustration and even damped-down anger, I will have experienced a wonderful inner growing that will brighten my existence as well as that of those around me.

There is a sort of dark satisfaction in being quarrelsome and critical. You can make an art form out of being judgemental, and if you’re cleverly articulate in your opinions it can all become quite addictive. But if that whole strand was missing from the tapestry of your life, the space would be filled with something softer, gentler, lovelier. The milk of human kindness.

As I get older and the world seems to spin faster and faster with more and more information spinning around with it, I am feeling a great need for less. Less, and better quality. I am looking at any voracious appetite I may have as a possible addiction and am seeking to study if it really serves me.

This has gone past the usual suspects when people talk of addiction—alcohol, nicotine, other drugs,excessive food. This is more about an appetite for numbing my intelligence with  asinine blog posts, YouTube blah and forgettable television. Surely my time is worth more than that? My life time. Time that, once used, is gone forever.

Any kind of addiction takes away from my life quality. Why work hard on the alcohol and food segments but let digital consumption run rampant? Part of it is laziness because it’s easier to be entertained, however badly, than to get up and do something. Part of it is a desire to simply sit, but there are other and better ways to do that. In the end, it’s a choice. A  thinking person chooses a better option.