Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [2]
You will also find an extensive list of resources at the end of the book, which you can use to dig deeper into some of the tools and techniques shared here.
This is not just another “throw out your crap” book. Discardia is a reminder and a framework for personal change. I want to give you the tools you can use to achieve a life that is ideal for you. Try them. Take the ones that work for you. Incorporate into this framework other good advice and techniques you’ve learned for simplifying your days, uncluttering your head and home, upgrading your life, and being true to your real self. Build the system that works for you from the good tools and techniques you find.
On any given day, work from the side for which you have the most energy by adding more access to what you love or carving down to less of what you hate to have in your way. You will find that a particular technique may be valuable to different people for different reasons. For example, you may be chatting with a friend and saying that you’re going to spend the next 45 minutes working hard through your to-do lists—ready, set, go! This may work for one of you because of the synergy that comes from being connected and supported; for the other, it may work because you’re less likely to procrastinate if you know that someone is paying attention.
Discardia is fun and flexible. Because the length of the holiday varies slightly on each of its appearances, it remains new and energizing, able to reflect the different rhythms of our lives. Enjoy yourself! It shouldn’t just feel like you’re flossing your apartment. Moving on from who you’ve been to who you’re being deserves celebration.
When is it?
Discardia takes place four times a year. Sometimes it's short and sometimes it's long, since, in an effort to uncouple the holiday from any cultural bias, it is scientifically timed by our world’s natural motions through the solstices, equinoxes, and their following new moons. The precise dates can vary depending where on Earth you’re located, but I encourage you to discard being too fussy about that. Use the indicators in your own calendar or the dates I list on the Discardia website or just celebrate it sometime during March, June, September, and December each year. For convenience, the dates for the next few years (with thanks to the calculations of Discardian engineer Seth Golub) are:
December 21–24, 2011
March 19–22, 2012
June 20—July 18, 2012
September 22—October 15, 2012
December 21, 2012—January 11, 2013
March 20—April 10, 2013
June 20—July 8, 2013
September 22—October 4, 2013
December 21, 2013—January 1, 2014
There is also a public Discardia iCal calendar available at Discardia.com.
The daily art of living a Discardian life year-round
Celebrating Discardia once will make your life better than it was the day before. Celebrating it four times a year, every year, will begin to have positive, long-term impacts on your happiness. That’s plenty of benefit for very little effort! If you really want to start feeling the wind in your sails, though, try being a Discardian every week or, better yet, every day.
Throughout the book, you’ll find text displayed like this, which will highlight timely directions you’ll use on a daily or weekly basis, such as best practices for starting your day at work.
Open your eyes to the blockades you’ve put between you in this moment and where—and who—you really want to be. When you see those barricades, knock them down. Build bridges to your creative, happy self. Quick fixes can add up to deep changes.
I have been living the Discardian life for nearly a decade now and it has brought me more delight, in more aspects of my life