Coffee Contemplation: An Age of Choosing

Less but better.

Audio narration by David Marlow

My granddaughter found this leaf among all the dried brown ones. She loves to go barefoot too. David Marlow©2024

Transcript:

David Marlow-This week's Coffee Contemplation is inspired by the unseasonably warm weather we've had here as we've started fall in Wisconsin. It's been just beautiful. It reminds me of something because I was out walking in the yard, barefoot, crunching on the leaves of all things.

My grandmother used to love to go barefoot all year long, and she could, but especially in the summer.

When she was young, she and her eight siblings received one pair of shoes each year. That's it. She went barefoot to save those precious school shoes, rather for school and church.

She grew up on a farm and she thought it was fun to be free to go without shoes. It was just a habit that my grandmother happily continued well into her last years.

Now today I have three pairs of shoes just for running. Nope, check that. I have a fourth pair for running in icy conditions.

Abundance and prosperity are spreading, which is a good thing in many ways. When I was a boy, for example, 40% of the world lived in abject poverty. Today it's less than 10%. Still too high though a dramatic improvement.

And that abundance — and this is what I want you to think about — that abundance is more than just things like shoes. Knowledge is spreading too. We can access data and information in seconds on our phones it would have taken years of research to pull together in the not so distant past.

With so much information available, some good and some not so good, the era of knowledge might be ending and we might be entering the age of choice. I want to talk about that today.

We won't just decide what we want to buy, we will determine what fills our minds, what we fill our minds with, how we live and how we impact the world. What life do we want and whom do we want to be in it?

What life do we want and whom do we want to be in that life? As Dieter Rams said, he's the designer from Braun, "We want to make things better. What we need is less, but better."

So we need fewer things and what we have needs to be better. There's a strong application in my mind of this principle in our Ikigai journey. We need to work to make our world better. I think everybody can agree on that.

We need less stuff, and the stuff that we have needs to be made better. Doing fewer things and doing them better. Fewer connections, better relationships, better experiences.

Fewer things, even the things we want or need, need to be better. And when we do that, when we focus on that, this promotes harmony in all that we do.

Remember Ikigai is expressing our essence and purpose harmoniously with whatever we do.

🌀Less but better.

I'll leave you with a final thought.

There are a few things of value. Focus on those things, grow those things, and make those things better.

That's your coffee contemplation

Quest well.

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