552 | Stories We Tell Ourselves

Joshua and T. K. speak with writer Conner Habib about how the stories we consume shape our lives, esotericism, letting go of heirlooms, what to do with the junk you don't want to inherit from your parents, and more! Discussed in this episode: Whatever tracks you leave in the mud or the sand, the wind smooths them over. (1:17) Why does storytelling matter, and how do the stories we consume and create shape our lives? (3:51) Who was Rudolf Steiner, and what is esotericism? (19:06) Listener Tip: Letting go of an heirloom doesn't mean letting go of its story. (25:32) Right Here, Right Now: Joshua's solo tour and T. K.'s Clutter Counseling sessions. (35:34) Listen to the full Maximal episode on Patreon: patreon.com/theminimalists http://patreon.com/theminimalists Detailed show notes: minimalists.com/podcast http://minimalists.com/podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Every 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'll be fine without it.

• 0:38Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes, The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn here. TK Coleman is over there. And today, we have a special guest. Today's guest gives lectures on spiritual topics around the world. His writing and conversations are part of his life's project of creating a new spiritual culture that is supportive of creative freedom, intellectualism, political compassion, and an economy of real connectivity. Please welcome to the show our friend Conner Habib is here.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Wow. The only MMA champion to defeat himself and still retain the belt.

• 1:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Here's something to chew on, gentlemen. Whatever tracks you leave in the mud or the sand, the wind smooths them over bit by bit. Soon, no one knows where you've been, or even that you were alive at all. Connor, that's a line from your novel, Hawk Mountain. What do these words mean to you now?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Wow. I've never been confronted with those lines before. Those lines are taken sort of loosely from a suicide note that was found, which was a very simple suicide note that said, "Let the snow cover my tracks." And it was in a book of suicide notes that I read when I was a kid. And I was thinking about a character having this idea of being erased as he went. And I think that leaving suicide out of it, but maybe bringing death in, in a way, when we try to understand ourselves, we have to die again and again and again. We have to be erased again and again.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  There's a Christian mystic named Meisur Eckhart, who wrote that "only the hand that erases writes the true thing," which I know would be resonant with you guys. And also, you know, when Joan Didion wrote her novel, "Play It As It Lay," she said, "I wanted to write a novel that erased itself as it went." And I'm paraphrasing her, but she said something to that effect. And I think that that is true. Like, obviously, we discover things when we become unfettered. And hopefully, what we find is that we've died to an old self and have become aligned with who we are, our purpose, our destiny. Not so easy. And it's also something we have to do again and again and again, all the time.

• 3:09Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I love this idea of erasing. And I think that'll be a bit of a theme as we go today, because we're going to pull you into our world of minimalism. As you know, this is a listener-driven show. So today, we're going to be talking about the stories we consume that shape our lives. We're going to talk about esotericism. We'll talk about letting go of heirlooms and much, much more. Plus, coming up on page three, we'll talk about what to do with the junk you don't want to inherit from your parents. Let's start with our callers, 406-219-7839, if you want to join the show. Or you can just go to theminimalists.com/podcast now, and you can record a voice memo right there on our website, theminimalists.com/podcast.

• 3:52Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Our first question today is from Alex.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Good morning, minimalists. My name is Alex. I'm from Winslow, Arizona. I've been a longtime listener to the podcast. I've watched the documentaries. I've read all your books. TK, we share the same faith. So my husband and I have listened to you, featured on many other podcasts. And you all have just brought so much value and love and intentionality to my family life. So from the bottom of my heart, I have so much gratitude for you. So this morning, I'm sitting here with my cup of coffee, looking at my bookshelf with a big old smile on my face. So ever since you brought TK on the podcast, there's been this really playful jest between

• 4:37Speaker 04

  the two of you about books. And so I want to talk about books. I'm a Kindle reader as well, but I sent in a photo of my bookshelf. And for me, it's very intentional. Many people would not call this minimalist, but for me, it's very intentional. Each of these books brings a smile to my face. And I use my Kindle almost every day. So I want to talk about the importance of storytelling, why, as humans, we share stories, how storytelling brings intentionalism into our lives. It brings value to our lives, and it can help clear out emotional clutter. Like, why do we do that?

• 5:17Speaker 04

  And, you know, for me, I don't have social media, so I'll bring my Kindle with me everywhere, and I'll flip open a book and read versus scroll. And with journaling, I journal a lot. And I think that journaling, passing down your thoughts and ideas, words, drawings, anything, I feel like it's just so important. And so I just want to talk about the love of books. I want a TK Coleman reading list so bad. And I just appreciate any insight and love and value that you have on this topic. I think it would be an incredible podcast. So thank you so much.

• 5:57Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Alex, what a lovely question. And I think we will get to a TK Coleman reading list here by the end of it. First, I want to just put up a picture on the screen here, if you're watching the video version of the show. These are Alex's books, and she questions whether or not this is a minimalist bookshelf. And I would say, it depends. Do these books add value to your life? Do they serve a purpose? Do you have all of the minimalist books on your bookshelf? If so, then it's a minimalist bookshelf by default. We'll send you the certificate. It is in the mail, Alex. No, Connor, when you see a bookshelf like this, I don't think about whether or not this is minimalist, because for me, if you gave me all of these books, many of them would just be a type of clutter.

• 6:41Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I mean, if I'm not going to read them, it's going to get in the way. But I think her question was much deeper than the bookshelf. There was something about the role of stories. And I'm curious, what do you think about the role of stories in creating a meaningful life?

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Okay. First, just to back up a tiny bit, one of the reasons why I'm in Los Angeles is to clear out a storage unit. You guys don't know this yet, but it's like, I could not have found a better group of people to talk to on this trip. And that storage unit had maybe 2,500 books, and that represented maybe half of the collection that I had before I moved to California. And now I have a storage unit in Ireland, filled mostly with books, before I get there, right? I'm getting rid of most of those books. It is painful. It is a painful process. And I knew I was coming to talk to you guys, so I was thinking, well, what am I doing with all these books? What's my future vision for them?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And the future vision was always to have a library that people in public could access, so that, in other words, they could have a minimalist life, kind of at the expense of my carrying all the objects for them, but having a library for them.

• 7:52Joshua Fields Millburn?

  He's the book martyr.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And I get that feeling when I look at this a bit. It seems like, because the question for me immediately is, why these books, not others? Why do some books go on the shelf and some go into the Kindle? And I would guess that some of it is wanting to share what you've curated in your life, in your inner life, with others. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a bookshelf full of books that you can say, "Read this, and we'll understand each other a little bit more." That can't always happen through conversation, because when you read a book, especially when you read a novel, you really are encountering the contours of someone's mind, the inner landscape, in a way that you cannot with any other art form.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  As much as I love movies, I love music, they have a spectacle quality, which is not as participatory as reading a book, where if you read the word "cat," if you read the word "cat," you see a different cat than I see. So when we read a novel, we're co-creating the pictures and the story with the person who wrote it, who often might be dead, who might be someone who you're never going to meet, who's from a different place, has had completely different life circumstances, and you create this thing together with that person. So I would say, probably, these books have some sort of meaningful place for this listener, and that she wants to say, "Let's, I created something with this book. Would you like to create something with this book as well?" And I think there's something in that for me when I see this bookshelf.

• 9:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  What's the Joan Didion quote that you mentioned earlier about the book erasing itself?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I was paraphrasing. I don't know the exact quote, but it was something like, "I wanted to write a novel that erased itself as it went." Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  The actual quote can't be as good as that.

• 9:32Joshua Fields Millburn?

  At our live events, I'll often, I'll give someone a copy of Everything That Remains, which is my favorite book of The Minimalists. And I will say, it's the only book that will teach you how to let it go after you've read it. And so I'm actually impressed that I don't see any copies of our books on her shelf. It means she actually read them.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  She did.

• 9:54Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And then the book itself will teach you how to erase it from your bookshelf. But I often talk about minimalism being the application of spaciousness. And this still feels rather spacious to me. She has more room for books. Not every square inch is crammed full of books. But the question is always not, what should I let go of? It's what am I making space for? And sometimes, it's just space for more calm, more serenity. But sometimes, it's what you're talking about here with space for the stories, or the connection, or the intellectualism. Or I often tell my wife, "If I die before you, make sure you read Infinite Jest, because you'll learn everything else you need to know about me." David Foster Wallace was my favorite author, and she, there's no way she's going to read Infinite Jest right now. It's like reading a phone book.

• 10:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  But I will say that, like, there's so much in those pages that, yeah, I know it's been sold as a movie, and they've tried to turn it into a movie. There's no way you can turn something like that into a movie or a series. It's about the interior life that you can't capture externally. TK, what about that reading list?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll recommend some books, some books for fun. Just one little quick piggyback on what you were saying about the difference between other forms of art and reading. With most forms of art, we embellish the world, articulate the world, or highlight some aspect of it. But with storytelling, we literally create worlds. And I think when we are creating worlds, we are most human, because that's ultimately what we are. We are creative power and expression, individualized as us. And so I think that's why stories feel like they have a special place in our hearts. And they also function as a kind of mirror. In stories, we can see ourselves, and there are insights and ways of seeing that can

• 11:43Speaker 02

  penetrate the heart through story that simply can't happen in propositional form. You present a truth to someone, like, you should care about others, you should take your life seriously. As a proposition, you know, you analyze it, you agree or disagree, and then if you agree or disagree, the thinking stops, right? It's just, that's it. But when you tell a story about someone who didn't quite take themselves seriously, and they live to regret it, no one's telling you how to think or how to live, but you see yourself somewhere in that story, and it speaks to you at a deeper level. I'll pause there before I get to a reading list. You want to say anything about that?

• 12:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I would say, yeah, my favorite stories are the ones that are not overly didactic. And that's why I love Jonathan Franzen's work, because it does both. He'll tell and he'll show. And we always hear that you should show and not tell, but of course, there's narration that is required to tell. But the showing is equally, if not more important, because what you're really showing someone, they're showing themselves to the story that they're creating in their mind. I will say that stories are also dangerous, Connor, in the sense that the reason we hold on to a storage locker full of stuff isn't because of the stuff, it's because of the story we tell ourselves about the stuff. Does that resonate?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do have this story of being, it's like, my image is of like, being Doctor Strange or something like that, in Ireland, and having this office with like, a giant wooden desk and like, books, like, totally wrapped around me, right?

• 13:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  I don't know if that's gonna happen, you know? Like, probably not, especially now that I'm giving away all these books. But I think that there's this idea that I have, it's a second life that I have. In the same way that when I lived here, I had this idea of being like, a grizzled surfer who lived in a beach shack on, you know, in Venice by myself. And that was like, a fun fantasy to hold. And in fact, these fantasies become sustaining for us in a lot of ways. It's not just about letting go of them, but about understanding how they support and enable the life that you want to live by never happening. And so I think that allowing that to never happen is also healthy, you know? But not by just saying, I don't have this fantasy anymore. Just investigating what it's for, what it means to you.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  And I can see that that fantasy enriches me in a way of like, well, I have the library inside of me. Because one of the interesting things, when I went through all those books, and this isn't a brag, but I have read probably 90% of the books that I had. So it wasn't like, oh, I was shocked by it, actually. I thought I had had a lot of books that I just hadn't read, that I hadn't, that were just sort of sitting there. But as I went through, I was like, I read all these, I don't need to have them anymore. So the fantasy is actually a representation of my inner life. And so letting go of the illusion that I have to make it happen is something.

• 14:33Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes. Our mutual friend, Peter Rollins, I think that's how we originally met, he talks about object A.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:43Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And the desire for the thing that we want, whether it is, I want this perfect bookshelf, this perfectly curated bookshelf, or I want the BMW, or the Mercedes-Benz, or the Lamborghini. And what often happens, as soon as you get it, your desire is erased. And it's actually the desire you wanted, not the thing itself. And once you get it, we've extinguished or erased the thing that actually made us come alive about that dream in the first place. TK, what books you got for us?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  I'll just give some recommended reading. So the first two on my list are not actually books, but they are book lovers' dreams. The first is Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. She writes pretty regularly about, you know, just philosophizing about the books that she's read, and she's an amazing summarizer of books. And she will afflict you with a book list that you will be chasing for the rest of your life, but you will discover so many great books through her. Her love for reading is a form of, you know, unintentional salesmanship that is completely unrivaled. The second is The Paris Review Interviews.

• 15:55Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  These are available online, and these are interviews with the writers, and they have them dated from decades, so you can go back to like, 50s, 60s, 70s. There's a Hemingway, you know, interview. And listening to writers talk about the writing process makes you interested in them and their works in a different kind of way. And you also get a lot of great book recommendations from them, because they talk about a lot of the books that shaped them as writers and gave them a love for literature. So those are two non-books that I recommend. Now, since you're Catholic, I'm gonna give you a Catholic book that's called In Praise of Sons of Bitches. And this is such an interesting book, because the premise of the book is that all of the good that God intends to do in the world, he has done it through and continues to do

• 16:40Speaker 02

  it through, sons of bitches, just like you and I. And it's a great book about kind of like, the role of the outlier, the role of the outcast and the reject, and how our idea of sainthood is often the thing that most gets in the way of becoming a saint ourselves and recognizing them when they are among us. Very excellent book. Another book, Edward de Bono, is called Water Logic. It's a very small book, but it's a book about lateral thinking, and I just think that's a good one, that's a relatively easy read, but pretty impactful. I'll recommend a graphic novel called Unflattened. Even if you're not a fan of graphic novels, this is one that's kind of like, a visual feast for the eyes, and it's got some really profound, like, philosophical messages about

• 17:24Speaker 02

  why we're here, that are not too prescriptive, that are not too on the nose. And then, I have one more, just a favorite short story that I talked about a lot on the show, Ursula K. Le Guin, it's called Rule of Names. And you can read that short story in about an hour or less, and it's about the power of language and the magic of how we approach that. So I'll pause there.

• 17:52Joshua Fields Millburn?

  We'll put a link to all of those in the show notes as well, over at theminimists.com/podcast. Also, I'll throw a link in there, I have nine books up on our website that have really shaped me and my writing, from fiction to nonfiction poetry, at theminimists.com/recommendations. And Alex, I would love to send you three books to add to your bookshelf. How minimalist of me, right? The Minimalist, two most recent books that came out this year. TK has a hardcover version of his book, Emotional Clutter. And in the spirit of minimalism, we usually have a copy here in the studio, but he gave it away to someone, because he's just constantly giving away things that are here in the studio. Last week, we ran out of microphones, he was just handing them out to people on the street. But I would love for you to enjoy, it's a beautiful version of Emotional Clutter, which

• 18:37Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK just put out this year. And also, this short book called Very, Very Simple. It's 69 pages, 12 tools, 12 rules for a simpler home, fits right in your purse, or your pocket, or your bookshelf. Or you can buy 10 copies and hand them out to people who are also looking to clean out their storage locker. And of course, one more book for you, since Connor is here, why not check out a copy of Hawk Mountain? We'll send that to you as well. It's Conner Habib's novel, Hawk Mountain, which I read a quote from at the top of the show. Connor, before we get to our next caller, I want to talk to you for a moment about your work. Your bio says, quote, "I give lectures on spiritual topics around the world, particularly on the work of Rudolf Steiner and esotericism."

• 19:21Joshua Fields Millburn?

  So who was Rudolf Steiner? What is esotericism? And why do they interest you?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Wow, big question with years of development behind it. So I'll give you the two-minute answer to that question. I was brought up with no religion whatsoever. And so as a result, thankfully, I was not violated, as many people are, by having religion forced upon them. I got to choose my own religious path and became a deeply spiritual person as a result of that. I found Rudolf Steiner through science, because he is a late 19th, early 20th century occultist that has negative connotations, but really, it means trying to find the spiritual truth in the world.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  He was an esoteric Christian, so for Alex who's listening, and for others, just to get some orientation there. He was an architect, if you've ever heard of Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, community shared agriculture, CSAs, those all come from Rudolf Steiner's work.

• 20:26Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  So his work infused practical, social initiatives that are highly popularized in the world. He influenced a lot of different people, too, who you can just sort of look into, who's been influenced by his approach to life, which is called anthroposophy. As I said, I discovered him through science. I was going to school for creative writing and also organismic and evolutionary biology. And my professor, Lynn Margulies, who is my main sort of intellectual mentor, took me to a science conference called Bioneers. And there's a little table there for a place called The Nature Institute, which was doing a three-month program on Gertian science.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Johan Wukken van Gert, the author of Faust, as people might know him. And I was like, what is this? Lynn said, Lynn was very forceful. Lynn was, if you don't know her, the easiest way to sum her up. She developed something called the Gaia Theory with James Lovelock. She was married to Carl Sagan for a long time. And so she said, if you can get into this program, you have to go. And you just did not mess with Lynn when she told you to do something. So, so I got in. I was going to grad school for two things and teaching in Massachusetts. And I was driving back and forth from New York State like multiple times a week to attend this thing.

• 21:42Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wow.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  I didn't know that this was all connected to the work of Rudolf Steiner. I was living next to then a biodynamic farm and a Waldorf school. And suddenly I was just sort of soaking in this philosophy. It's really hard to sum this up. This is not a minimalist output in a way. He gave 6,000 lectures in his lifetime. He developed all these initiatives, highly influential, sometimes a controversial figure for people who look into him now, but also very interesting. I was thinking of a book that I would have recommended to her that was influenced by Rudolf Steiner. And actually, there's pictures of the Pope reading it called Meditations on the Tarot,

• 22:22Speaker 03

  which is by an anonymous author, but it's Valentine Tomberg, who was one of his followers that then converted to Catholicism. It's a beautiful, beautiful esoteric book infused with Catholicism and esotericism. And I think for me, the importance of his work is that he orients us towards love in a real spiritual way. He says, this is like spiritual science is what people call it sometimes. These are, it's verifiable in our own experience. Once we do certain meditative practices and they don't affect everybody in the same way. It's not a linear prescription.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  It's get into your own inner being, try to understand who you are, what is the human being? What are we capable of? And when you do that, it actually shows you that the world is much stranger than you thought it was. It opens up the whole world and hopefully, if you really committed to it, it opens you up to love. The sort of infiling of love from, well, Christ, but the being of love is maybe what we'd say to make it not so restrictive or prohibitive to people who might be from different traditions. And many people from different traditions are into the work of Rudolf Steiner, which has populated itself through many different countries throughout the world. Yeah.

• 23:43Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How familiar were you with his work at all, TK?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Rudy Steiner?

• 23:47Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had about a two-year period where Rudy Steiner and Walter Russell were just two guys I poured into pretty deeply. So, yeah, we talked a little bit about like, before we hit the record button, we talked a little bit about the occult. And because it sounds like cult, it often gets sort of like, or sometimes the occult is often used as a synonym for Satanism. And so what gets washed over is that the occult is really just the esoteric, the piercing to the inner core of things. And so it's mysticism essentially. And yeah, yeah, yeah, this guy's talking my language.

• 24:32Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Connor, do you have any other book recommendations for Alex before I move on to another caller here? Anything that really stands out to you?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  I mean, if anyone wants to check out Rudolf Steiner's work, actually a really great book is called Start Now. And that's edited by Christopher Bamford. And it's just exercises that you can do. That's actually how I really got into it was like, I'm not just gonna, I mean, something he said is, I don't want you to believe me. I want you to understand me. I mean, he said it actually with some frustration in his lifetime because he once said, his shoelace was untied. And someone said, you know, Dr. Steiner, your shoelace is untied. He said, yeah, but I don't want to tie it because then all these people standing around are going to think there's a right way to do it based on how I did it. Because people are so like hardcore into everything he did, you know? And so I wanted a book of exercises that could show me what happened when I engaged with this work.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  And that's where a lot of my engagement came from was just this book, Start Now. Yeah.

• 25:30Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Before we get on to page two, we have a minimalist insight from one of our listeners. This is from Shay in Franklin, Tennessee.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  Hello, minimalists. This is Shay calling from Franklin, Tennessee. I was at your Franklin event and Nicodemus's response to the question about the fate of the Corolla helped me make a connection I was not expecting. I inherited my grandfather's old typewriter, which he bought brand new in 1946 and wrote every correspondence on until he died in 2008. He was president of a very large union for decades and even typed letters to Jimmy Hoffa on it. But we travel full-time and everything we own lives in our Tacoma. I've been dragging that 48-pound typewriter in and out of hotel rooms for years. Hearing Nicodemus talk about letting go of the Corolla made me realize it was time to let the typewriter go. I found a wonderful home for it at a shop in downtown Franklin.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  The owner is beyond excited about displaying it and she's in the process of getting it functioning again. She even named it Roy after my grandfather. I feel so much peace about the whole decision. Thank you guys so much.

• 26:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  For context, Ryan and I were doing this tour, 10th anniversary tour of our first film, Minimalism. And one of the stops was at the Franklin Theater in Franklin, Tennessee. And someone asked him about, hey, where's the Corolla in the film? Because we affectionately used to refer to it as our tour bus. We would, we've gone to hundreds of cities over the years, coast to coast to coast in his 2003 Toyota Corolla. And eventually he, he decided to let it go. And he would tell the story better than me, but the reason he decided to let it go is he felt like it had took on some other meaning. He had deified the, the fact that he has this 2003, I'm a kind of minimalist who doesn't even need a nicer car than this.

• 27:23Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And then that became a sort of host or master for him to, to then, I don't know, be subservient to. And he realized like, no, I kind of want a new car. And I think he got a 2015 or 2016 other Toyota. But like, it was, he replaced that and he let it go. And he realized how difficult it was because he wasn't letting go of the Corolla. It was the Toyota Corolla from the minimalism documentary. It was the tour bus. And it felt like he was letting go of the memories or the experiences that we even had in that. But part of what you talked about at the very beginning with the, the erasing piece is, is the, the overemphasis

• 28:03Joshua Fields Millburn?

  that maybe we put on memories and they keep us tethered to a past that doesn't exist in, in the present. And I know that's a fairly bland way to say it, but the truth is that we often try to drag the past forward and it prevents us from living a life. And quite literally what we have from Shay here is this 50-pound typewriter, or whatever it was, carrying it around all the time. What a, what a beautiful metaphor of the things that weigh us down. And I'm wondering, Connor, since he let it go to someone else who, who has named it and it's found a new home where someone actually enjoys it. It seems to me there's something spiritually significant about allowing some sort of object

• 28:47Joshua Fields Millburn?

  that you perceive to be meaningful to continue its story without us.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Okay, I got a weird place to take this and I'm really excited about this.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  If it ain't weird, don't bring it.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, I love, yes, that it gets to have a new life, right? So it's an honoring of the typewriter in a way that you couldn't have done it, right? The weird place I want to take this is just by talking about art in general. Because, give me a minute to get there, but I'll get there, I promise. So when we make art, what happens is we reach into some sort of weird infinite realm of metaphors, images, tones, pictures, whatever it is, and we kill it. We bring it down into us and we limit it. It actually dies, like the, all the artistic infinity dies into us.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  And as we create it, we form it, we turn it into something and we refract the light that we've captured. In a way, the way that the light of the sun in some ways dies on the moon in a way, even though it still lights our way at night. It, it becomes limited, it becomes ours. And so then what happens is we give that art into the world. So it's, it's dead in a way, it's limited. And then someone else encounters it and it springs into life again in their imagination, right? So in some ways, the whole artistic process is a process of coming into being, dying,

• 30:22Speaker 03

  and then being resurrected through another being. Because it enters their imagination, it becomes active again. So all art really does seek an audience. And I think it's true with objects sometimes too, when we've imbued it with a creative life, with all this storied life. And it's like, it's not an exact analogy here, but this thing was longing to be. That's what he was sensing, not, oh, I should carry it around, it has so much meaning for me. He was sensing the activity of this thing longing to come back to life with someone else who could hold it and let it live again.

• 30:54Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. How beautiful. I'm reminded of, we interviewed Dan Savage for our next film. And he was talking about how he and his husband are like maximalists with stuff. And he was talking about the table that he inherited, I believe, from his great grandfather, the kitchen table that they have. He said, "We often treat our things as though they're ephemeral. They're temporary, but I think we're the ephemerality. We are what is temporary. And it is those things that will often go, that will live on beyond our lives." And it makes me think of when you go to the Beverly Center, right down the street from here,

• 31:36Joshua Fields Millburn?

  and you walk into a fast fashion store. None of that is meant to be, it's all meant to be hyper temporary. They have 52 seasons at H and M. It means every week, there's a new season, a new drop that they have, right? It's designed to be temporary. And I think TK, that's a relatively new phenomenon where we've designed for, you know, we call it planned obsolescence even. But what we're talking about here is breathing life into this thing that he was just carrying around. He didn't have, he could stop carrying it around, and by being willing to let it go, it could actually add value to someone else's life.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, man. We've talked before many times about the story of the guy who, you know, dreamed of moving to a faraway island. And so he built, day by day, a boat that would sail him there. And he finally achieves his dream, and he's so grateful for this boat and what it's done for him, that he carries it around on his back. And one day after being there for many weeks, someone says, "Hey, why do you always carry that boat on your back?" And he says, "Because this is the boat that represents my dream. I built it, and it's what got me here." And he says, "Well, it seems like the boat has served its purpose, and now you can't even experience that purpose because of your loyalty to the boat." And he realized that by letting go of the boat, he could live out the mystery

• 33:00Speaker 02

  that this boat represents. And that's how it often is with our physical things. By letting them go, not out of a spirit of, you know, moral duty, but out of a recognition of the essence of things, we find deeper ways to live them out. You know, that typewriter represents the capacity for magic, the ability to create, because your grandfather did something with that typewriter. He took those tools and he created connection by the meaning that he put into it. And so, in a certain kind of way, your grandfather is still present with you through what that symbolizes. And as a part of letting go, we have to say, "How can I allow this energy to live through me in a deeper way that doesn't depend on the thing?" And when we find that, we find peace in letting it go, because we maintain

• 33:45Speaker 02

  the substance of it.

• 33:47Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Connor, I think I'm pretty utilitarian, so sometimes I really appreciate TK's approach here, because to me, I look at, I'm like, that's a tool, and you use the tool to do the job. But I also respect the fact that we assign sentiment to certain items. And I understand why. When I was letting go of my mom's stuff, it was difficult to let go of any of it, not because of, I really wanted more doilies in my life, but because she had created those doilies herself. And what I love about what Shay did with letting go of this typewriter, he was no longer confusing the typewriter for his grandfather. Yes, the memory is in us, and sometimes the things can trigger the memories in us.

• 34:26Joshua Fields Millburn?

  But this typewriter, nor the memory, is not your grandfather. Your grandfather existed, and this thing was there to sort of amplify his existence in some way. And I think, in a weird way, letting it go is another way to honor that.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that actually your grandfather is way more eternal than the typewriter. So you don't need the typewriter as the signifier of him anymore. You can actually get in touch with the fact that he is actually eternal, in the way that we all have an aspect in ourselves that will actually outlast every single thing that we see around us, even the mountains, that there's a part of us that is not affected by time in the same way that all those things are. So it's nice for the typewriter, because the typewriter's life is actually, lifespan is actually shorter than your grandfather's, as funny as that might sound, as reverse as that might sound, yeah.

• 35:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. That makes sense to me. On the, yes, he's dropped his body, so to speak, and you've dropped the typewriter now, but there's an essence there that lives on.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:31Joshua Fields Millburn?

  All right, we have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to still. First, real quick for our Right Here, Right Now segment, I got two things going on in the life of the minimalist. I'm doing a tour right now. It's called the How to Let Go Tour. I've had a really difficult year. A couple of things, I had a really big creative project that fell through that I spent three years on, and my brother died recently. And so, even as one of the titular minimalists, I've decided that I still have to keep letting go, right? It's, I wish there was a bliss point that you reached, and, "Well, here are the 100 items you should own, and now you're happy in perpetuity." Or maybe it's not 100 for you, it's 112, or it's 317. But the truth is that we have to keep letting

• 36:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  go in order to move forward. And I started writing this book called How to Let Go, and it didn't work as a book. I realized it was more of a one-man show. And so I'm taking that one-man show to Seattle next month, and Vancouver next month, and also New York City later this fall. And if you'd like to join me, there are still some tickets left for all three of those cities. Head on over to theminimists.com/tour, and we'll spend an evening together, and we'll learn how to let go together. I'll tell some stories, a lot of laughter, definitely be some tears as well. But let's let go together. theminimists.com/tour to grab your tickets to the How to Let Go Tour. And also, if you're struggling with

• 36:57Joshua Fields Millburn?

  physical, emotional, or relationship clutter, the minimalist can help, or maybe book clutter, if you have book clutter, esoteric clutter, is that a type of clutter, TK?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  I'll help you make peace with it.

• 37:09Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Well, you can book a clutter counseling session with TK Coleman. Head on over to theminimists.com/CC, which stands for clutter counseling, and you can book a session with him today. Up next, page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Josh, you forgot about one more tour.

• 37:27Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Why?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  For Connor's book, Hawk Mountain, he's doing hawk tours.

• 37:37Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Oh, we're not editing that out, TK.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I'll be here all week, folks. I'll be here all week.

• 37:42Joshua Fields Millburn?

  He really will be. Every time I come in, he's just hanging out. All right, y'all, we're gonna take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back.

• 37:52Joshua Fields Millburn?

  All right, y'all, that is the first 33% of episode 552. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two-hour maximal edition with Connor Habib. Actually, it was longer than two hours. We had quite the conversation, including answers to a bunch more of your questions, like Steph loves her mom, but she hates her clutter. What should she do? Also, Jeff has accumulated years of photos of his son and their adventures together, but no one really wants them, including his son and him, but he's struggling to let them go. Also, Beth Ann considers herself agnostic, yet she experiences a kind of gratitude that makes her wonder

• 38:32Joshua Fields Millburn?

  whether she's connecting with something beyond herself. We'll talk about that and a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you get access to our private episodes on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our archives, all the way back to our very first episode in 2015. That's a lot more of less. Big thanks to Conner Habib for joining us today. You can check out his podcast. It's called Against Everyone. We'll put a link to that in the show notes, as well as a link to his novel, Hawk Mountain. You can check both of those out in the show notes. That is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus,

• 39:17Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK Coleman, Audio Ben, Spire Jeff and Dave, Tom Cat, Professor Sean, we got Bonnie from accounting on the couch today, and Savvy D over there on the board, and the rest of our team, I'm Joshua Fields Millburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this: Love people and use things, because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Much love.