This is my cat.
His name is Maximus Leopoleon. He is a mystery of sorts, deathly afraid of everything but that which he feels the dire need to overpower and destroy. A cross between the Cowardly Lion and King Leonidas, he encompasses all the qualities of a stereotypical house cat. Also, he drools like a freaking pit bull.
But when I think about him and how he conducts his business, he really has boiled down the essence of catdom to a simple, concise message, and surprisingly, it's not "feed me." He's like the haiku of the cat world: it is what it is, and there's really nothing more to him than what needs to be. It really made me start to think about how much "boiling down" I could stand to do in my own life. If I wrote a one-page summary of my entire life as it stands right now, what would be excluded? More importantly, what would be included?
There's an exercise in which many a seasoned thespian takes part, in which a pair of players generates a two-minute dialogue between themselves, following it up with a compressed rendition thereof, lasting only one minute. This process continues through thirty seconds, to fifteen seconds, and finally to a ten-second dialogue that is still meant to capture the essence of what was truly being communicated in the original two-minute scene.
The idea here is brilliant. If time were money, narrowing a two minute discussion down to ten seconds would be a 92% savings. The idea of minimalism has always been extremely appealing to me, but this concept isn't minimalism. It's reductionism. It's the simple act of viewing the complex system that is life in terms of the interactions of its individual moving parts. It's weeding out the things that don't need to be there.
I'm not about to go on another one of my purging sprees - I did that in college and wound up sleeping on a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket and no pillow. This is just another one of those introspective moments that happens to me every once in a while to make sure I'm still growing - still reaching for that next part of me that's just out of reach.
These blog posts will probably start getting shorter.
At least for a while.
But not less meaningful.
I hope.
We'll see.
This is all for now.
-R.
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