We do fewer things than we used to, and we go to the theme park more. Those two facts are one fact.
Our family’s word for it is concentration, in the plain physical sense. Concentrated juice is juice with the water taken out: the same juice, stronger in every drop. A concentrated life works the same way. The same attention, poured into fewer things, so each one gets our whole selves.
At work it looks like effort. At home it looks like presence. Same move: all of us, in the thing in front of us.
So we cut at the level of the whole life. Fewer pursuits. Less chasing the next rung. More of us reaches the few things we kept, and a day at the park with Addie and Kins, lived all the way, is one of them. That’s what we cut the rest for.
The rest still gets a floor. We keep a minimum on everything we didn’t choose to go deep on, enough that nothing important falls over. Full on the few, a floor under the rest.
Comfort’s welcome here. We like to indulge, and we do, on purpose. Concentration runs between two ditches: the spare life that has little and enjoys less, and the acquisitive one that has plenty and is fed by none of it. We keep good things, and we enjoy them all the way.
It holds in every room we’ve tried it in. Fewer friendships, held closer. Fewer things on the calendar, each one we’re all the way there for. Addie and Kins have their own version, because “just do your best” is what we’ve always told them: fewer things, given our best.
Your few things will be different from ours. Picking them is the work.
A few things, held long enough and fully enough, are the things that compound.
Fewer. Fully.
— Daniell