Your Personal Occam’s Razor
How to rescue yourself and the people you love from the confusion and indistinction of faceless crowds.
“The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.” — Thomas Merton
One of the best parts about gaining a clearer sense of your purpose, in all its specificity, is how much easier it becomes to say “no” to most things — so that you can say yes to the few things that you must.
There is no vacillating, no menu anxiety over the choices of life; there is a sense of duty around which everything else falls into place, and the “wanna hop on Zoom?” requests are quickly put into perspective.
For those who do not have this strong sense of purpose yet, the best place to start may be with the incarnate realities you are already immersed in. I am thinking of someone who, like my father, a simple man, knew that being a good dad was one of his fundamental responsibilities in life and said no to anything that might get in the way of it; or someone who is given custody of a precious ring and must get it from point A to point B, who must evaluate any and everything that comes his way in the context of the…
