Hi everyone!

In case you haven't heard yet, I've been on a six-day surprise holiday with Rach. Well, it was no surprise for me, because I organised it, but it was a surprise for Rachel, who didn't see it coming at all. It was quite a lot of fun. We went out west and visited our friends Liz in Orange, Fish in Dubbo and Bec and James in Bathurst.

Congrats go to Liz, who managed to get engaged the day after we left . . .

Exciting stuff, eh?

Also to Fish, who managed to snag himself a girlfriend by following the old Roy Orbison Principle: "I drove all night . . ."

The interesting thing about the holiday was watching myself whenever I went near shops. (In regards to the whole newness thing.) I could feel my excitement levels growing when I walked near a bookshop or a music/DVD store. I didn't even have to see a particular book or movie I was interested in. I just wanted to get in there and look for new ones.

Does anyone else get like this? You just want to get something new, even though you have no particular idea what new thing you'd like to get?

Anyway, my newness tip for today will cause some pain:

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

When it comes to newness, email newsletters are the killer. With many of them now coming weekly or even daily, it is quite possible for you to never be on top of your email inbox.

So, my suggestion for today:

Unsubscribe yourself from every newsletter that won't a) lose you your job if you don't read it or b) seriously (and I do mean seriously) impact the major relationships in your life.

When the four weeks is up, we can have a think about subscribing back up to them, but for now, cancel the lot of them.

Now, you probably won't want to do this because you enjoy getting all these new newsletters.

That's fine. I enjoy getting them too.

But, the reason we're getting rid of all this new stuff is because we need some breathing room to deal with old stuff.

If you've got unanswered emails sitting in your inbox, or it's been a long time since you emailed that old friend of yours, then take it from me: a month of unsubscription will be good for you.

Heck, if you want, you can even start to read some of those urgent or half-finished books or those half-watched DVDs in the time this will now free up.

Enjoy...

Matt | 2:44 PM | |

BOOKS

For those of you non-readers, you can switch off now. This one especially applies to me, but there may be others among you like me.

You have lots of books sitting around the place, many of which you haven't read.

You have a few that you've borrowed from other people and either a) haven't read or b) haven't returned.

But, despite all this, you love reading book catalogues, getting new books from the library, borrowing more books and buying more books from bookstores, and convention and camp bookstalls (always a killer on the Christian bookworm's wallet).

Now, the interesting fact of life is:

You can only read one book at a time.

There may be a brief exception for those who can read a different book with each of their two eyes, but for most of us, you can only read one book at a time.

So it makes sense that perhaps we should focus on one book a time?

So here's the plan of action:

Pull out all books which belong to someone else.

Ask yourself, Am I really going to read this?

If you're not, give it back to the person and say, "I'm sorry, I ran out of time to read it."

If you are, drop everything else you're reading and read those books now, one at a time.

Don't pick up any other books in the meantime until you've finished off the one you're reading.

When you've finished those, then we can move on to the ones that you've half read. But that's for another post.

Have fun!

Matt | 10:59 AM | |

In my last post, I was talking about how a lot of the stress that we feel is this constant feeling that we need "new" things. So we find ourselves in a position where we're constantly being bombarded by new things.

However, I think the point in all of this is that a lot of these relentess new things we let into our lives. Nobody tells us we have to read heaps of email newsletters, have to keep up with lots of things that are going on, etc. After all, there's plenty of people out there who don't keep up with as many new things as we do, and they're not any the worse off for it.

So, here's an interesting experiment . . . why don't we try shutting off the flow of the new, just for four weeks? I'm going to try (starting yesterday). It's called my Big Newsness Block. I don't know if I'll get onto this blog every day, but I'm going to suggest something whenever I can that YOU can do to stop new stuff coming into your life (just for four weeks), so that you can breathe a bit and then work out what to do.

I don't have a tip for yesterday (I'll let you do what you like on Sundays). But here's my tip for today.

NEW DVDS/VIDEOS

If you're like me, you have a collection of videos and DVDs. However, you might also have a stack of borrowed DVDs and videos. Someone may have pushed a movie into your hands and said, "Here, you should watch this." You may have eyed it off at a friend's place and asked to borrow it. And now it's sitting there on top of the DVD cabinet. You started out by thinking, "I'll watch it sometime soon." But you can't seem to find the time.

Now, this is a fib, actually, because when Star Wars III comes out, you know you'll drop everything to watch it. Or if a movie comes on television that you really want to watch, you'll find time to watch it. Or your favourite movie comes out on DVD. Or you see an episode of a television show on DVD, and it hooks you into watching all the episodes in one hit.

So let's not kid ourselves that you haven't got time to watch it. Basically, what happened is that you let that stray DVD into your house when you were in one of those moods for something "new" but it has got buried in an even stronger flow of more "new" stuff.

So, here's what we're going to do. Before we watch any more DVDs from the video store, or borrow any more from anyone else, we're going to watch the borrowed ones and then return them. If it turns out that you're really not interested in watching it after all, give it back to the person and apologise profusely and say, "I'm sorry. I just didn't get a chance to watch it." If you really can't find time to watch it this month, give it back to the owner and say you'll borrow it when you really can watch it (ie within two days of borrowing it).

Now, when you've sorted that out, look for DVDs that you have bought, but you haven't watched all of them. What about that second disc of extras on a movie you've got. Have you watched them all? I bet you haven't. So, this month, instead of getting out new movies or borrowing new ones, if you sit down in front of the DVD player, why not relax and enjoy catching up on the unwatched parts of the old movies you already own?

Starting today.

Matt | 4:08 PM | |

I was recently reading a post by the one and only cafedave talking about information overload. This has actually prompted me to do some thinking. And I'd like to share that thinking with you and offer a bit of a challenge. For starters, go to this link and read Dave's comments plus the post that he's linking to. I'll wait till you get back.

All right. Back with me? Now, most of you (especially those of us online) will probably agree that information (all of it good and interesting) just keeps coming at us. I have a theory, though, that wasn't mentioned in the article, but I feel it coming through.

My theory is that all of us who are feeling busy and flat out are feeling "The Flow of the New". What do I mean by that?

By The Flow of the New, I mean that loud voice in our heads, that nagging feeling in our bodies that says for our lives to be fulfilling, we need to be doing something NEW and DIFFERENT.

For instance, why is it that we'll go out wandering around bookstores, looking for some new book to catch our eye, when at home we have piles of books that we've never finished or, worse yet, never read? Because we want something NEW.

Why is it, when we have a large collection of movies, that we'll want to go out and hire a stack of new ones? Because we want something NEW.

Why is it, when we have hundreds of CDs, do we feel the constant urge to buy new ones? Because we want something NEW.

Why, when we have a wardrobe full of clothes, do we still want to wander the shops looking for more? Because we want something NEW.

Why do we always want a bigger stereo, a bigger TV, a bigger car, a bigger house? Because we want something NEW.

Why is news called "news"? Precisely because that's what it is . . . a bunch of "new" facts that you haven't heard before. It's some "new" information about the world to add to your collection.
Why do we turn on the TV to see what's on? We want something NEW to stimulate us. The stuff we've already got lying around the house just won't do. We need that rush of the NEW.

Why, when we hear about a new movie coming out that we want to see, do we keep reading up about other movies and find out that there's four that we want to see, and then beat ourselves up if we only see two of them? Because of that relentless drive of the NEW.

Why do we check our email a billion times each day when we have 100 emails sitting there waiting for a reply? Because we want something NEW.

Now, the crazy thing about all of this is that a lot of our deepest satisfaction in life actually comes from enjoying old things. For example:

Our Christian faith. The interesting thing about the Christian faith is that it's nothing new. God handed down his word to us, completed about 2,000 years ago, and it hasn't really changed much in that time. If you're hoping to get an email tomorrow of a new bit of the Bible, it's not going to get there. Our satisfaction in God's Word comes from meditating and looking more deeply at things that we already have been given, not looking for more and more information to load on top of it.

Friends. Seriously, when it comes to making friends with people, what kind of sad world would it be if we only talked to new people we'd never met? How would we ever make deep and meaningful relationships if we didn't spend time developing our friendships with people we already know?

Long-term projects. Some things in life take a lot of time. They require us to keep coming back to the same thing over and over again. (Whether it be building a house, making a quilt, reading a long book, etc.) If we constantly drop these things in favour of new things, where would our life be?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that all new thing are bad. Progress is great, and newness, freshness and variety are all good. But we need time to enjoy what we already have. Back in the old days, people would have called it "contentment". If we don't feel complete until we get that new thing, well, then, when will we ever be complete? We won't. It's all an illusion.
Anyway, the real question is: having recognised an issue, what can we do about it? I'll be back shortly with a radical new idea that has come to me . . . in the meantime, what do people think? Am I on track? Way off beam?

Thank you, Dave, anyway, for a stimulating idea . . .

Matt | 2:57 PM | |