I am a practicing soul minimalist. I learned this term recently in Emily P. Freeman’s The Next Right Thing Podcast, and it hit me very specifically. This is something I’ve been practicing for as long as I can remember. I remember being very young, probably younger than ten, and having a realization that my mind was like a rolodex—yes, this is the picture I created in my head, it was the nineties—with no way to remove anything. Whatever I saw, read, heard, was there permanently. As I crystalized this realization in my head, I began to steward the rolodex. Back then, my main concern was nightmare avoidance, which meant the thing I needed to keep out of my mental rolodex was nightmare fodder, aka scary movies. To this day, I can count on one hand the number of scary movies I have seen.
So my list for how to be a soul minimalist from age nine to twenty-nine looks something like this:
don’t watch
don’t listen
don’t read
don’t click
don’t look
Honestly, these things have served me really well. In a culture of flashing ads and screens and information overload, being intentional about not clicking something that isn’t of real value is a habit I’m happy to have developed. The tabloid rack at the grocery store checkout line leaves me totally confused. there are people who read this stuff? people who BUY this stuff? I mean, I get it, check out lines are boring. I just find it’s better for my soul to be a little bored for a few minutes than finding out which celeb just got cheated on.
But here’s one problem with this long list of don’ts. I find that when I’m really fixated on a checklist of things I don’t do, there’s an underlying assumption that there are people out there who are breaking these rules left and right. People who I’m better than, of course.
And what if it’s not totally true that the clutter is permanent? What if there’s a way to let go? In episode one of The Next Right Thing podcast, Emily talks about silence as a way to combat soul overwhelm. I’ve practiced various types of listening prayer, but never from this perspective. What if I could just sit silently before God, as a way to let go of the soul clutter I’ve accumulated? What if it’s not about hearing from God or working through anything specific, just about letting the clutter fall away, letting the dust settle?
So that’s where I am, at age 30. My list of don’ts is still there. But what’s become more important to me for keeping a quiet soul is this: being quiet.
I lay on the floor of my bedroom, and I set a timer for six minutes. I spend the first few seconds looking out the window, then I close my eyes and focus on just being still. When I get up, I’m not a new person. But I do feel calmer. And I feel like I’m holding on a little less tightly to whatever was concerning me six minutes ago.