If you know what it’s like to get a word stuck in your head, you’ll know what I meant when I say I’ve been fixated on the word “effortless.” As I previously wrote, I owe gratitude to Jennifer L. Scott for first bringing the word into my conscious awareness this year. That gave me the assurance that I was not the only person chewing on this word and wondering what it would mean to apply the ideals therein to life.
Still, when writing in favor of doing more effortlessly I felt a bit self-conscious. Isn’t it just an excuse for laziness? Yet, the more I explored this concept of creating ease and delight in ordinary life, the more unburdened and alive with possibility I felt, all while continuing to meet the ordinary demands of life with a spouse and a house, children, work, clogged drain lines (a perennial theme), a teething baby, etc.
Imagine my joy upon discovering that Greg McKeown, author of the highly readable and encouraging 2014 self-help book, “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” has another book, titled, get this: “Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most.”
After the success of “Essentialism,” McKeown writes, he thought he had successfully whittled his life down to only the most important, spending his time and energy only on the people and activities that mattered most. And yet, when his daughter suffered from unexplained ill health, the weight of responsibility between caring for her, dealing with appointments and medical bills, work, and life were crushing, but there was nothing “non-essential” left to eliminate. What then?
McKeown describes the process of defining what it means to perform effortlessly and details obstacles to this state of being and strategies to increase the likelihood of effortless action. It is in the intersection of his thoughts in “Essentialism” and his strategies in “Effortless” that a compelling and inspiring way of life reveals itself. As McKeown lays out, it is about doing the most important actions in life in a way that helps us experience them as effortless.
This does not mean that living on this mortal coil ceases to be difficult. McKeown acknowledges all the ways that difficult and challenging experiences will present themselves. But what if the background noise of our relationships, home, and work was steady, focused, and even enjoyable? McKeown writes, “Life doesn’t have to be as hard and complicated as we make it. Each of us has — as Robert Frost wrote – ‘Promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.’ No matter what challenges, obstacles or hardships we encounter along the way, we can always look for the easier, simpler path.”
There is, as McKeown notes, a Puritanical streak in the Western/Anglo world. We are by default generally suspicious of anything “easy.” It is assumed in our cultural context that “blood, sweat, and tears” are the only way to forge meaningful progress. That is, likely, the reason I hedged on my title in the last piece on this subject, calling “soft life” (another way of saying “effortless”) “a complex art.” Is it really complex? It’s actually quite simple. How can you make enjoyable the mundane activity of your life? How do you take respite and choose to care only about activities that matter to you? On the one hand, I suppose those questions are complex; on the other, they may only appear that way because our cultural tendency is to overcomplicate and overburden ourselves.
McKeown is a lively writer with a panoply of fascinating examples. From basketball free throws to Antarctic explorers, McKeown develops his ideas through many and varied anecdotes.
He also has a way with words, repetitively offering vocabulary that distills abstract ideas into concrete strategies. His use of the phrase “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” (taken from the Navy SEALS), will illuminate the experience of caring for small children or mastering complex new skills. We so often think we will “save time” by rushing, but dealing with all the things we’ve bungled in our rush leads to tension, further hurry, and unhappiness—all the states opposed to that elusive feeling of effortlessness.
And feeling effortless can seem elusive. And yet it is possible to increase the chances of entering that flow state of optimal function and feeling. The ideas in the air at the moment convey the impression that you wake up and discover your mood for the day. Experience demonstrates that thoughts we nurture and actions we take make our moods more or less likely. Waking up to a relatively tidy house having slept reasonably well after going to bed with a grateful heart? The morning is much more likely to feel extravagantly beautiful. And it’s easy to see that thoughts and actions opposed to those will have a different effect.
Thinking through some of McKeown’s examples and repeating to myself, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” I was gripped with a sense of novelty and excitement. It then occurred to me that, beyond my musing on “soft life,” this is, in fact, a topic I have written about before in different words. I argued previously about the pace and strategy of the characters in “The Lord of the Rings,” which demonstrate many of the same principles McKeown presents. Additionally, I was quite taken with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s description of being “in grace” and “out of grace” and how to become a woman striving to be at peace with herself.
In other words, what I mistook for a revolutionary concept is, in fact, a novel (to me) way of expressing the same principles. This is not to suggest that McKeown’s book is not worth reading. Quite the reverse! This engaging book offers realistic and inspiring examples of how to feel fully alive while accomplishing the required tasks of our state in life.
If you, like I, wondered what kind of married father of four professes to enjoy listening to Michael Bublé and the soundtrack to Frozen, this mystery would be partly explained by the fact that McKeown is Mormon (if you know, you know). The particulars of his strategies to more effortlessness might not be a one-to-one, but his principles are well thought out and well worth trying.
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