539 | Drop Everything

0:20Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it Yes, the minimalist Joshua Fields Milvern here, TK Coleman over there What's happening?

0:45Well today we are joined by minimalist restaurateur a man with great hair an impressive jawline exquisite taste and a very very Greek surname Ryan Nicodemus is here baby that is the best intro ever I'm gonna change my Twitter bio you can borrow just copy and paste we're good to go Nicodemus here's something to chew on whatever you're clinging to is already gone whatever you're clinging to right now is already gone TK when I say that what's the first thing that comes to mind I think about that scene from the Matrix where Trinity is is in that dark room and you have these five like you know police officers whatever who've like cornered her and you know these guys about to get the business they have no idea what they're up against and Agent Smith calls the lieutenant and warns him about Trinity and he says oh agent I've got five guys in there I think we'll be just fine and he says no lieutenant your men are already dead I think about that saying man whatever you cling it to it's already dead if you're clinging your men are already dead man the the life comes in holding it loosely and allowing it to be what it is you can only allow something to be what is conducive to its most flourishing state when you hold it loosely when you cling to it in order to control it you suppress what makes it beautiful and valuable in the first place yeah yeah we just did a whole weekend this weekend that's why nicodemus is here we had this minimalist retreat with 30 people up at the ojai art center in ojai california and the theme of that weekend is letting go and it's so fascinating to see what we are clinging to because some people showed up uh there was one woman who's like i have these two juicers i want to let go of yeah and there's someone else says i want to let go of my career and someone else says i want to let go of the resentment i have for my adult children i want to let go of the things that i'm clinging to and what i'm hearing from you is that anything that we're holding on to too tightly not holding on holding on is fine in fact holding on is usually pretty helpful i can't get anywhere if i can't hold on to anything i put butter on my hands try to go across the monkey bars i'm going to slip off so i need to be able to hold on but i also need to be able to let go so we spent a whole weekend with these folks there i actually took this line from an essay i wrote recently i put out in the simple newsletter subscribe for free if you haven't already but um it was called nothing ends and it was sort of the final i don't know chapter in this trilogy of essays that i wrote about my brother who died and a couple weeks ago we did an episode about jerome and and sort of used that to let go and i wrote this eulogy called jerome is a simple man and i wrote this thing about how he never complains and and then i wrote about his funeral more from my perspective although i wrote the essay in second person because it was just too close to me and and so i had to write it from your perspective so for example and by the way you can find this over at theminalists.com as well um the first line is you are dry heaving in your rental car parked a few free feet from the procession and the whole thing is you is from your perspective because i had to sort of separate myself from it because by the time i got to the end of the essay it wasn't really about the funeral it was about the things that we cling to and so at the end of the essay i wrote an hour later on the other side of town the sun breaks through the clouds the air feels different you think about all the things you once held so tightly and so we go from this rainy funeral it was literally it was pouring rain during this eulogy i was giving so much so it's like a scene from a movie i had the paper in my hands right and i had all these notes written on on top of the typed words and i had written out this eulogy for his ceremony this letting go ceremony we were doing and as i started reading the first time i mentioned his name someone else mentioned this to me they as soon as i mentioned his name it started raining harder and the tint i was in like this rain was slanting in and all the words started washing down the page oh wow and so this thing i'm trying to read i no longer had access to it so i just had to crumple up this wet paper mache set it down and just keep speaking and after that it was really strange because an hour later the sun came out and then i was sitting in a coffee shop on the other side of town and just sort of thinking about it and there were three things that i thought of several other things but the three things i wrote in the essay were the dream home you thought would fix everything was in the end just four walls and a roof you know things we cling to when we put it in perspective you're like this is some drywall yeah i'm clinging to drywall and rocks and and concrete and that's not what i'm really clinging to what we learned this weekend is a lot of people were clinging to the story behind whatever they were having trouble letting go of the career you chased for years eventually became something you felt stuck inside i think many of the things we chase once we get them we're like the dog that catches the car it's like what the heck am i going to do with this now i really wanted i wanted to chase this thing i didn't want to actually acquire it and when you get it now you feel kind of stuck or maybe with the dog with chasing the car he ends up getting run over and i think that can happen with the career that we think we want sometimes yeah and the last thing i wrote here is the kids you grew up with now have kids of their own their lives kept moving while you weren't looking in fact some of our friends have grandkids that's wild bj yeah he has five kids and i think one or two grandkids already he's our age nicodemus yeah that's wild man and so i i found that like life keeps going on and the very last line of this is nothing ends it changes and whatever you're clinging to is already gone because by definition everything is going to change this podcast has changed we brought tk on years ago and uh malabam was here for a while it didn't end it just kept changing and even when the podcast quote unquote ends that's also a a change as well yeah there's no plans for that but i also i'm not clinging to to anything at this point because every time i cling we learned that this weekend the more that we cling the the more that we get dragged by that clinging yeah when you read that man i thought of uh it's like when you first read it it was one of those things that it hits me like it's so true but i was having trouble to kind of like understand like why it's true but what came up to for me is um relationships like i think about relationships that were over you know women that like um i really wanted it to work out with it just wasn't working and when it wasn't working i just clinged i just held on and clung to the relationship and uh the same thing with my job like you just mentioned it's like i knew it was over but man i was clinging i don't know why why that's the reaction it's like we're too we're too scared to let go so instead of just letting go instead of just admitting like okay this isn't serving me anymore there's like a fear reaction of like i'll just hold on even tighter it can't leave me yeah or i'm supposed to want this that's the thing for me like other people would kill to be in this position and that is true and i don't want to discount that right yeah but then as soon as they get in that position they may feel very similarly to us or they may not and that's okay as well but there's something about the uh i also think there's something about the clinging that ruins the thing right it's uh needing it so bad like oh i need this i need this i need this as an energy i was at the farmer's market we we brought some of the simple haven folks cat is here with us today we brought some of the simple haven folks to the ohi farmers market sunday morning and um there was a guy who came up to me he's like hey minimalist guy we've met before and uh i have two business cards i want to give you and and and like i i totally understand where he was coming from and i hope this doesn't come from a place of judgment but i felt an energy there where it was like i need a particular outcome and the reason i feel that energy is because that's often my energy inside like i i really hope that this happens and i'm signing a contract with myself that says if that happens i'm allowed to be happy but until then i i will cease to be happy until i get the outcome that i want yeah you know there's a there's the old idea of of trying to capture the muse so that you can always retain inspiration but whenever anyone successfully captures and imprisons the muse they realize something that they have the body of the muse but they lack the spirit of the muse in order to receive the spirit of the muse you have to let the muse be free and inspire whoever it wills and it's similar with situations relationships people and things what makes us come alive is our interaction with the spirit or the essence of the of the thing and when we imprison that thing when we cling to it we attach ourselves to it because we prioritize control over the possibilities of uncertainty we we kill the life of it you know and it becomes something other than what it was that made us happy yeah in some ways to control is to cling as well you can tweet that professor sean you know we got a lot to talk about today gentlemen we're talking about dropping everything for a fresh start why one big change often leads to several more changes we also have a handful of questions to ask before you buy anything and much much more also nicodemus on page three i have this list here if you gave the minimalists the keys to your house and just two hours to declutter we're going to tell you what we would get rid of first so let's start with our callers 406-219-7839 if you want to join the program that is our phone number or you can just send a voice recording right from your phone to podcast at the minimalists.com we'd love to hear from you let us know if you're a patreon subscriber when you call in oh by the way shout out to our patrons your support keeps this podcast 100 advertisement free because sing along at home y'all advertisements suck yuck all right our first question today is from steph steph here from melbourne australia i'm a patreon subscriber i've also been listening to your shows for years and i have just become absolutely obsessed with them my question is a little bit of a tricky one i recently left a 10-year relationship which was good at the start had two beautiful boys but unfortunately turned pretty bad in domestic violence due to gambling and addiction i've now been left with a house that i own um and a business that is thriving i'm a hairdresser but the problem is even though i've decotted my whole life the trauma he caused me just makes me sort of want to run i've been given the opportunity to move to another state it would mean selling my house and losing my business but then moving for a fresh start i just would really like to see what you guys thought would be a good option your advice would be amazing i really just don't want to do a disservice to my kids but i think a fresh start would be so good thank you so much for all your amazing things you do on the show i really adore you guys so steph wants a fresh start where does she start to find that fresh start man that's heavy yeah sorry uh sorry about your situation there steph that that is a tough one i mean i do i do think that when we experience something so traumatic like steph described here um the immediate reaction can be to run to run away from it and sometimes you got to run away right i mean someone's chasing you that's exactly it sometimes you got to run sometimes um maybe that's the the flight is the first response but man if we don't know what we're running towards i mean that that could just uh set up a whole new set of problems i mean steph is dealing with trauma wherever steph goes to the trauma is going to follow her yeah and so it's not about um you know the city doesn't define who you are it's it's it's the challenges in your life like those are the things and how you face them like that's going to define who you are in this situation stuff there's nothing wrong with moving there's nothing wrong with staying if there's a compelling reason to move in the sense of there's new opportunity you can clearly see what you're running towards then go for it but to run away from a city simply because that was the place in which something traumatic happened to you um i would be careful with that yeah remember the kendrick line you thought the money the power the fame would make you go away i think the same thing is often true with geography at least in my own life it's like well if i just move to a new city then i won't be there anymore like my problems my issues and and i think sometimes that's true so tk i wrote down this maxim for steph maybe you can help me unpack it tell me if you agree with it or if you'd append it in any way geography won't fix you but it might free you i was trying to channel my inner tk coleman with that one so geography won't fix you simply by moving you won't be fixed but it may free you to become the person you want to become and that's why this is delicate and there's not a simple answer of well yeah of course you move to x city i think there's a lot more to consider than that yeah you you we we've talked about this quite a bit and even some this weekend how i grew up in an environment where that was talked about a lot no matter where you go you will still be you and you can't use geography as a way of escaping the realities of who you are and i do believe that but there's absolutely more to the story sometimes changing your external conditions like the city where you live the home where you live the people that you're around might be the easiest and best way for you to facilitate other kinds of interior changes that are important to you sometimes it's easier to establish a new rhythm of life a new pattern of behavior a new way of seeing and thinking just by putting yourself in a new space and so there's nothing wrong with staying but there's also nothing wrong with going nothing wrong with going somewhere else and and sometimes a fresh start can be exactly what you need to breathe new energy into your life so when i hear you say geography won't fix you but it might free you what that means to me is hey moving into a new space isn't going to transform your life independently of how you leverage the opportunity on the other hand moving into a new space can be the permission slip you need to unlock new possibilities in your life and i love the energy of a fresh start i don't think you need to know all the details about what will happen next in order to have the permission to do it i think it could be helpful to to to just sort of write down what what are some things i am hoping to feel or experience discover or do as a result of that fresh start and that can maybe help you get a clearer picture of of what those priorities look like and how they compare to what you have i i forget who it was i believe it was w.eb du boy who said something to the effect that we must always be willing to abandon where we are in order to discover what we can become um and that there's something powerful about being willing to look at your life and say you know i i know what i'll get if i continue down this path but i'm going to bet on myself my capacity to improv my capacity to create and i'm going to look at what i have as an expression of my power not as the source of my power i have what i have because i'm the one who created it i don't have what i have because it created me and so if i need to go somewhere else and get a new start i can recreate this or create something even better if my energy is in a good place life is about energy it's not just about what you have it's about your energy and for me i like to make my choices based on where can i place myself so that i'm in alignment with the energy of my full aliveness because if i'm there i can recreate or create more effectively what it is i need around me yeah one thing we need to understand here a couple things you're bringing up so one is a a time-tested maxim from us from way back in the day is a willingness to let go is life's most mature virtue now because you're willing to let go doesn't mean you have to let go and i think sometimes you get freed up if you're willing to move away from the city you live in and then you don't move because then you're making a deliberate choice to stay in that city for at least a period of time however what you're also what you're saying also resonates with me there was a a line that recurs in the novel i wrote back in my 20s called as a decade fades the the line was well the novel is about this young famous singer-songwriter who moves from Dayton Ohio to Brooklyn, New York to try to rediscover himself for the fresh start because everything sort of comes tumbling down in his personal life.