about that minimalism thing: part 9

I guess we'll start with this quote from an earlier entry:

Also, amused myself with some more minimalism. I took the things I had left to digitize and decided to digitize them finally. I had a whole stack of CDs that I needed to process. Some of them had sermons on it. None of them are even working. I went through all of them already. So silly, right? This is hilarious. Now I just need to work on the things in my book closet and we should be good to go. Now I just need to sort the bills out in my closet and see which ones I want to keep and which I want to trash. Should be fun.

Turns out, it just wasn't Mac readable even on my Windows partition. Ah well. I guess I'll have to speed up that process of getting that PC laptop now. Mind you, I'm not getting it just to digitize stuff. I am a developer for a company that has designed software that only runs on a Windows-based platform (boo!), so I need a computer I can use to do that development work.

Ah well. The things I did manage to get on the Mac are fantastic. I actually listened to a bit of stuff from Joyce Meyer today and I enjoyed it. It was hilarious and insightful and relaxing. I enjoyed it. In my efforts to keep my iPod minimized, I listened to two or three albums today.

• Brian Rhodes, Completely. Listened to as I was sent this by my friend, Miranda. I remember the guy from college; he was an upperclassman. He can sing his tail off, but I was sad because all of the songs were songs from other Christian artist that was popular. I hoped, I mean I really did, that he had written some of his own stuff and that I would get to hear a CD of that. Instead, it was music from a band too small to be able to do the pieces in the first place, some of it was slightly out of time, etc.
  
• Third Lobby, For the Taking. This album was ok. I liked the instrumental tracks most of the time, but the vocals? Some needed to be better blended with the sound levels on the instruments. The girl did not need to sing high notes ever. There was one track I liked with a female vocal, but it was a different singer and very well done, IMO, for that album.
• Joyce Meyer. We covered that one.

I applied the "Hell Yeah" rule to all of it and kept whatever made the cut. Joyce Meyer won by far. I thought about other things in my room as I considered these things.

How to be more passionate and live more passionately and closer to the things that matter most to me, my faith especially. How to both be and do more passionately that which I am at the core of me. Lately, I want to read more and be online less and be alone more and all this. That's part of why I'm excited to be going to the mountains this week.

I'm glad I took the approach to minimalism I did by starting with physical things. It's biblical that when you do something in the physical world, there are echoes in the spiritual world. I've gone from removing unnecessary clothes to wanting to remove unnecessary emotional things, mental things, spiritual things, time-wasters, all kinds of things and I feel that, the more I move forward with the physical side of minimalism, the further my spiritual side moves with it. I can tell you that I want to go to church more now than I did before this project.

My project to make my iPod minimal is also going swimmingly well. Here's the quote on that:

Downloaded some new music, but got rid of more as I'm downsizing nonsense that I don't like listening to so that every song I hear on my iPod makes me excited when it comes on.

The payoff is in small things that are epically easier or more fun. For instance: today, I skipped over some songs on my iPod because they were slow tempo and I needed something more uptempo, but every song I skipped made me smile. Every single one made my head nod. It felt fan-flippin-tastic to feel like that.

It only gets better from here, I think.