Severed pieces of your fractured heart lay on the damp, cool Earth, salty teardrops following closely behind as gravity pulls it – and you – downward in its icy grip of pseudo-reality. Your surroundings blur and swirl mindlessly in confusion, painting an image of pure chaotic turmoil, the same of which you feel deep within the cracked crevices of your parched and untended soul.

Your uninspiring, unfulfilling and un-nurturing day job feels like an indentured servitude, where you work and work and work for a small broken bowl of watery gruel and a tiny piece of moldy bread, and that’s on a good day.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re given two days off the entire year to visit your family far away and bring with you your meager savings and a bent, rusty metal spoon you swiped when no one was looking. Your heart finally delights when you see the faces of your loved ones, faces which have aged and have lines and wrinkles where there were no lines and wrinkles before. No matter, though. You are here. And you are with them. And that’s all that matters.

**

Our most cherished memories are often memories spent with loved ones or spent doing what we love to do. Can you recall a time in your life when you were so completely uninhibited, so insanely free? You were at the top of the world, you felt invincible, you felt alive.

What about now? How do you feel now?

The job you say you don’t mind (but obviously don’t love) but still trudge to each and every day into the office as if it were your daily death sentence?

The countless dusty boxes filled with things you have no idea what they are, why you even had it in the first place, what you were planning on doing with it? You know, the boxes you move with you wherever you go? More out of habit, rather than an intense close examination as to WHY you are doing what you are doing?

A minimalist’s life is not one without change. We are not just talking about getting rid of your useless things which bog you down, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. We are not just talking about paring your wardrobe down to the basic essentials and donating the rest of your clothes to Goodwill. We are not just talking about keeping your handbag to a simple accessory. As if all of these were the only things we cared about.

No.

Being a minimalist means actively choosing what stays in your life that is nurturing, positive and enlightening and eliminating the rest with no regrets.

Do you hate yourself more and more each day because you are so unfulfilled and complacent at your job?

You need to quit and you need to do it now.

Are you in a relationship which is so utterly destructive that you no longer can identify who you are but only by the pained emotions you grapple with on a minute-by-minute basis?

You need to leave and you need to do it now.

Are you so encumbered by your debt from poor financial decisions and spending habits that you don’t even know how you can find the money for your next meal?

You need to stop everything and closely examine what’s coming in and what’s going out and you need to do it now.

The blurred abstractions of our beautiful, healthy and happy selves lay abstract and that is due to our unnerving habit of constantly submerging ourselves in the murky waters of consumerist and conformist society.

We no longer can see ourselves for who we really can become because we are constantly distracted by everything we must do, must have, must see, must be, that we lose sight of our most precious treasure of all: ourselves.

Step closer to your abstract self. Look deep within.

As you start to listen to your heart, your image of your abstract self will no longer stay abstract. Little by little, it will clear, as if you’re slowing regaining vision from once being blind. Until one day, it’s as crystal clear as the deep blue ocean waters on a hot summer’s day.

What you see is yourself, the one you’ve been looking for all along. Never let go. Never let you out of your sight, to fade yet again into an abstraction, a distant memory of who you once were.

Embrace your inner workings of the creative person you were made to be. Never will you forsake yourself, never will you have regrets.

This is the time to take back what you innately had within you all along: yourself and your dreams.