14. Figure out what you don’t want in your life

In addition to figuring out what your priorities are, it is also helpful to figure out what you don’t want in your life anymore. This is a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one to make.

We allow a lot of mental, emotional, and psychological clutter to accumulate in our minds and our lives, blocking our access to inner peace.

This clutter includes doing things we don’t want to do but continue to do, either because we said we’d do them or feel we should.

It includes spending time with people we no longer want to spend time with because we’ve outgrown the relationship or because they don’t contribute to our inner growth.

It includes doing work we aren’t happy doing.

It includes trying to do too many things, even if a lot of them are things we do want to do.

It includes not doing enough of the things we want to do.

It includes engaging in idle gossip and meaningless chatter that drains our energy and leaves us feeling grungy.

An amazing amount of the clutter includes fuming over past events we can’t change, or being distracted by future events that may never happen. It includes judgment (#65), and harboring thoughts that burn (#62).

As you move toward developing harmony in your life, you’ll find a lot of this stuff will fall by the wayside. Some things, however, will require an effort on your part to make sure they are eliminated.

You might want to sit down with your journal (#31) in the next few days and make a list of the things that are getting in the way of your inner progress. Then set up a plan to get rid of them.