By Leo Babauta
For the last dozen years, I’ve been living a (relatively) simple life. At times, the complexity of my life grows, and I renew my commitment to living simply.
Living a simple life is about paring back, so that you have space to breathe. It’s about doing with less, because you realize that having more and doing more doesn’t lead to happiness. It’s about finding joys in the simple things, and being content with solitude, quiet, contemplation and savoring the moment.
1376 quotes have been tagged as zen: Rumi: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.I'll meet you there.When the soul lies dow. Beauty & Relax Zen, Tielt. 493 likes 1 talking about this 12 were here. Beauty & Relax Zen is de ideale plek om te ontsnappen aan de dagelijkse drukte. Chantal zorgt ervoor dat iedereen zen. A to Zen is currently on an “intermission” due to COVID. As of January 2021, we have left our location on State Street and plan to re-open in a new location once COVID has calmed down and it is safe and feasible for us to do so. This may be a few months or many – it’s just too uncertain to know at this time. Beauty & Relax Zen, Tielt. 492 likes 3 talking about this 12 were here. Beauty & Relax Zen is de ideale plek om te ontsnappen aan de dagelijkse drukte. Chantal zorgt ervoor dat iedereen zen.
I’ve learned some key lessons for living a simple life, and I thought I’d share a few with you.
- We create our own struggles. All the stress, all the frustrations and disappointments, all the busyness and rushing … we create these with attachments in our heads. By letting go, we can relax and live more simply.
- Become mindful of attachments that lead to clutter and complexity. For example, if you are attached to sentimental items, you won’t be able to let go of clutter. If you are attached to living a certain way, you will not be able to let go of a lot of stuff. If you are attached to doing a lot of activities and messaging everyone, your life will be complex.
- Distraction, busyness and constant switching are mental habits. We don’t need any of these habits, but they build up over the years because they comfort us. We can live more simply by letting go of these mental habits. What would life be like without constant switching, distraction and busyness?
- Single-task by putting your life in full-screen mode. Imagine that everything you do — a work task, answering an email or message, washing a dish, reading an article — goes into full-screen mode, so that you don’t do or look at anything else. You just inhabit that task fully, and are fully present as you do it. What would your life be like? In my experience, it’s much less stressful when you work and live this way. Things get your full attention, and you do them much better. And you can even savor them.
- Create space between things. Add padding to everything. Do half of what you imagine you can do. We tend to cram as much as possible into our days. And this becomes stressful, because we always underestimate how long things will take, and we forget about maintenance tasks like putting on clothes and brushing teeth and preparing meals. We never feel like we have enough time because we try to do too much. But what would it be like if we did less? What would it be like if we padded how long things took, so that we have the space to actually do them well, with full attention? What would it be like if we took a few minutes’ pause between tasks, to savor the accomplishment of the last task, to savor the space between things, to savor being alive?
- Find joy in a few simple things. For me, those include writing, reading/learning, walking and doing other active things, eating simple food, meditating, spending quality time with people I care about. Most of that doesn’t cost anything or require any possessions (especially if you use the library for books!). I’m not saying I have zero possessions, nor that I only do these few things. But to the extent that I remember the simple things I love doing, my life suddenly becomes simpler. When I remember, I can let go of everything else my mind has fixated on, and just find the simple joy of doing simple activities.
- Get clear about what you want, and say no to more things. We are rarely very clear on what we want. When we see someone post a photo of something cool, we might all of a sudden get fixed on doing that too, and suddenly the course of our lives veer off in a new direction. Same thing if we read about something cool, or watch a video of a new destination or hobby. When someone invites us to something cool, we instantly want to say yes, because our minds love saying yes to everything, to all the shiny new toys. What if we became crystal clear on what we wanted in life? If we knew what we wanted to create, how we wanted to live … we could say yes to these things, and no to everything else. Saying no to more things would simplify our lives.
- Practice doing nothing, exquisitely. How often do we actually do nothing? OK, technically we’re always “doing something,” but you know what I mean — just sit there and do nothing. No need to plan, no need to read, no need to watch something, no need to do a chore or eat while you do nothing. Just don’t do anything. Don’t accomplish anything, don’t take care of anything. What happens is you will start to notice your brain’s habit of wanting to get something done — it will almost itch to do something. This exposes our mental habits, which is a good thing. However, keep doing nothing. Just sit for awhile, resisting the urge to do something. After some practice, you can get good at doing nothing. And this leads to the mental habit of contentment, gratitude without complaining.
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Of course, these are not the only lessons you’ll need for living a simple life. But the best ones are the ones you discover yourself. Try these and see what happens — I think you’ll find out something beautiful about yourself, and about life.
The best kind of simplicity is that which exposes the raw beauty, joy and heartbreak of life as it is.
So What is This About?
There is a continuing need to show the power of CSS. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The HTML remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external CSS file. Yes, really.
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CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. Designers and coders alike have contributed to the beauty of the web; we can always push it further.
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Participation
Strong visual design has always been our focus. You are modifying this page, so strong CSS skills are necessary too, but the example files are commented well enough that even CSS novices can use them as starting points. Please see the CSS Resource Guide for advanced tutorials and tips on working with CSS.
You may modify the style sheet in any way you wish, but not the HTML. This may seem daunting at first if you’ve never worked this way before, but follow the listed links to learn more, and use the sample files as a guide.
Download the sample HTML and CSS to work on a copy locally. Once you have completed your masterpiece (and please, don’t submit half-finished work) upload your CSS file to a web server under your control. Send us a link to an archive of that file and all associated assets, and if we choose to use it we will download it and place it on our server.
Benefits
Why participate? For recognition, inspiration, and a resource we can all refer to showing people how amazing CSS really can be. This site serves as equal parts inspiration for those working on the web today, learning tool for those who will be tomorrow, and gallery of future techniques we can all look forward to.
Requirements
Where possible, we would like to see mostly CSS 1 & 2 usage. CSS 3 & 4 should be limited to widely-supported elements only, or strong fallbacks should be provided. The CSS Zen Garden is about functional, practical CSS and not the latest bleeding-edge tricks viewable by 2% of the browsing public. The only real requirement we have is that your CSS validates.
Luckily, designing this way shows how well various browsers have implemented CSS by now. When sticking to the guidelines you should see fairly consistent results across most modern browsers. Due to the sheer number of user agents on the web these days — especially when you factor in mobile — pixel-perfect layouts may not be possible across every platform. That’s okay, but do test in as many as you can. Your design should work in at least IE9+ and the latest Chrome, Firefox, iOS and Android browsers (run by over 90% of the population).
We ask that you submit original artwork. Please respect copyright laws. Please keep objectionable material to a minimum, and try to incorporate unique and interesting visual themes to your work. We’re well past the point of needing another garden-related design.
This is a learning exercise as well as a demonstration. You retain full copyright on your graphics (with limited exceptions, see submission guidelines), but we ask you release your CSS under a Creative Commons license identical to the one on this site so that others may learn from your work.
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By Dave Shea. Bandwidth graciously donated by mediatemple. Now available: Zen Garden, the book.