ON MINIMALISM AND QUARANTINE
I was self-quarantined, despite not being an extreme introvert, on several occasions. During the Vipassana meditation 10-days-silent-retreats with no telephone, no talking, tight schedule and strict diet. During the 6-days-ski-mountaineering-route, with the same clothes and only surrounded by mountains and snow. And by solo-crossing part of Mongolia and other countries by bicycle.
These self-quarantines go along with a trend to need little. An old bicycle and a small bag, a silent cell to meditate or a laptop and a notebook with fountain pens. None of these situations has a sanctity element in it, but instead, an elevated need of control: if I need less, I own my life more.
This means daily: move with no lights in the darkness like a cat, traveling/commuting by bicycle, no-gears sports like running or yoga, light musical instruments like the flute, cutting the hair by oneself and never checking-in luggage. This light luggage lifestyle allows faster movements, a concept resumed by a friend called Veronica who said once — if some catastrophe happens, you will be the only survivor because your lifestyle is pandemic-like.
We are all surrounded by safety, cleanliness, luxury, drug addictions and more, all convinced about the usefulness of their obsessions. But is minimalism obsession is better? No, it is just a preference. It is not for everyone, just better for someone and not necessarily always.
Minimalism is about having a life made of small things: a small yacht, a small Ferrari, a small penthouse…. Is minimalism for rich persons, like Chelsea Fagan wrote on the Guardian? Not necessarily and neither means a lifestyle that is a “tedious piece of personal performance art it has come to be in our society”. Minimalists are neither into a “4,000 U$ dining table hand-whittled by a failed novelist in Scandinavia”.
Being a minimalist is about living with what is essential. This implies getting rid of excess stuff and living a life based on experiences rather than possessions. Younger people have already led the way by renting and other formulas that do not require possessing. Experiences cannot be stolen, damaged or lost. Being a minimalist does not mean austerity of neither fly business nor go to a luxury hotel, but neither to make a routine of it. Even if you can constantly afford it, stay adaptable to travel economy, sleeping in hostels and on friends sofas. It is not all about comfort.
For centuries we lived surrounded by borders and fences, an immunological society, as Byung-Chul Han defined it in the book the Burn-out society, ten years ago. Human history was based on minimalism, due to scarcity, ingrained in our lifestyle. But globalization suppressed all these immune thresholds for the happiness of many people, but not all. The society of abundance eliminates the negativity of the unknown. So, minimalists flee from the excess of positivity, which is expressed as excess performance, excess production and excess communication. The escape occurs with more or less success, limited by the others’ repression, that may give way to a war against oneself.
Minimalistic lifestyle comes in handy in this quarantine period, because of a faster adaptation to changes, in four points, personally experienced:
1. Please wear your mask, then help the others. It could not be a more timely metaphor. Before take-off, crews in the airplanes instruct to first take care of yourself, to better help the others later. Because we need to stay psychologically and physically healthy, we need to manage personal schedules, hygiene, food and sleep. I am a runner and used to run 10km in the hills surrounding Barcelona, so even a park is too small for me to run. But now I only have a terrace to run, and I consider myself lucky, so realistically assessing strengths and weaknesses, I succeeded in running 6km a day, repeating 600 times the same segment on a 24 squared meter terrace. This generates a positive mood, a better helpful stance for the others and avoids extremes like the Italian runner in Montelsilvano who, because being advised not to go running by his neighbor, destroyed his car in an anger attack.
2. Walk the talk, since you cannot walk in the street. On day first of quarantine, I was one of those annoying people organising online cinema, online yoga sessions, online cooking classes to enhances mine and my friends’ ability to stay home through positive influence. At the same time being a follower and attending other people’s initiatives. We simply followed minimalist cooking by assigning tasks, like buying the same groceries and by setting goals, like cooking online altogether. The idea was to offer solutions, not just problems and without thinking so much of what it was before and much less focused on when we will be back to real life. People reacted psychologically, physically and logistically well, facing openly stress, optimising resources and workload. Simply by sending a WhatsApp a day — and without creating any group -, it was enough to encourage participation in team activities and develop positive relationships.
3. From personal to online interactions. Because of COVID-19 and earning my life by teaching in business schools or companies, suddenly nearly all the planned courses have been canceled, but a couple and had to be online. This is a drama for a methodology based on personal interactions. Fortunately, the minimalistic layout of the presentation and a preference in the past to have selected workshops and exercises based on their essential classroom execution could be quickly adapted to the new online teaching requirement. The simple habit of “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” is invaluable online.
4. Stay safe, priorities have changed. I had to cancel all travels for March, April, and May, and these are essential to teaching in 7 different countries, spread on 3 continents. But what I did lose is freedom, hugging people and sharing time face to face with them. But now there is time to sleep, read more, talk more on the phone, meditate more, discovering the house and…who does need money if you can only buy bread and lettuce? This confinement can shape a new relationship with the partner because of the new priority of learning how to stay one whole month home and identify and manage different opinions. Make special what you have to do anyway, diversify cooking (I am the cook), sharpen your mind by playing chess (I am the loser) and using each individual’s culture to build the whole.
This crisis has hit exactly the worst habits of human beings, ignoring community well-being in favor of personal gain, spending time and resources on superficiality and taking for granted our increasing possessions. Suddenly we are all forced to see what is necessary and if we do not shut down all the nonessentials, the virus will shut down the essentials for us.
We have received another warning from nature about the threats of the physical tightness of the population and how difficult is to protect the fragility of the human being.
Our soul is what we have left after we have given up everything, let’s not waste a good crisis and spend the remaining quarantine in the rediscovery of our real self.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
