No Vacancy

You may not know it, but you're in the hotel business. It's true. Your life consists of many rooms that you rent out to numerous guests. Some permanent, some temporary, but all of them long to hole up in your life and many of them have no desire greater than to suck the life out of you. Greed is a regular guest, as is anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for power or control, possessions, stress, longing and selfishness are just some of them.

Yes, there are other guests that knock on your hotel door to get a place to set up shop, but even guests like compassion, kindness, love, happiness and gentleness are often miserable because the other guests in your hotel are loud, rude and sick!

Minimalism is the skill you may want to possess. Minimalism allows you to evict the unwanted squatters that are robbing you of time with loved ones, time to enjoy the outdoors, time to relax, to laugh, to get healthy and to genuinely possess a constantly abiding sense of joy and confidence.

Minimalism says, "I don't want anything. I have more than I need and I am free from want and desire".

Minimalism is not A way. It is THE WAY. Around the globe, even in "poor" countries, our species is addicted to things and the desire for more. It drives our cultures. It IS our economies!

Minimalism is the ability to find your true self and consequently become from free from the things that fool us into thinking we are happy, satisfied and free. Once those things that are fake and foolish began to disappear, we find ourselves hurting, struggling and groping. When the job takes a dive, when the need to pay the mortgage keeps us spending a third of our lives away from what we would really like to be doing, when the relationships sour, when the walls of dependence start to crumble and fall, we then find our cute little hotel is filled with demons and impostors.

As a minimalist I have spent the last decade doing the things I most enjoy. Meeting people, backpacking, eating healthy foods, laughing and spending time in awe of the natural world and its creator. My biggest decision each day is usually, "where do I want to hike or go backpacking?" As a result, I have fostered an indestructible sense of well-being in my life and meet lots of people because most people enjoy being around a genuinely happy person.

Virtually every major religion stresses the need for a minimalist lifestyle. Even the logical atheist finds that life is devoid of purpose and meaning when the hotel is filled with garbage. Yet, even those who follow certain religious traditions seldom actually LIVE by those tenets.

Let me suggest that each of us take time to clean house. Start getting rid of material things, start unloading the emotional baggage and determine now, to fill the hotel with beautiful, respectful and helpful guests. Then when struggle, discontentment, want, sadness, failure and bitterness knock on the door, simply point to the NO Vacancy sign. It is never too late. Do it now.