Know what I need to lighten up? Lighten Up!

photo by ~Dawn~

I was taking a look at my Mission today, and I realized something: in giving myself guidelines for simplifying my life, I was making the whole concept – and this blog – needlessly complicated. I have multiple areas of life I want to simplify, multiple ways I want to record my progress… and yet, the original idea was to make things easier. Simpler. Better.

Let’s look at the definitions of “lighten” that I reference in the ol’ Mission:

To make less heavy; to lessen the oppressiveness, trouble, or severity of; to relieve of cares or worries, to gladden.
To become less in weight; to become less oppressive, troublesome, or severe; to become cheerful.

To lighten is to make things less heavy and burdensome. I want this blog to be less burdensome for me, and less heavy for you. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be serious or tackle things that are challenging for me, but hopefully it won’t be all doom and gloom as it has felt to me lately.

More than that, though, I want the act of writing the blog to be one that lifts me up, that makes me glad and cheerful. I have realized – finally – that when my computer time is limited, not every post needs to be long. Or deep. Or insightful. (Not that they have all been deep or insightful, but they have all been long!) Some can be playful, some brief, some – let’s face it – shallow. I am allowed to be shallow. It says so in the rest of the definition: