Letting go!

 

Subtracting

·       Unending flow of people in our cities, roads full, more roads, asphalting and widening of roads, footpaths, traffic signals and policemen, flyovers – two/three storey high! – train and metro service, hyperloop, public and private transport jostling together,

·       Traffic signals on main roads driving traffic in by lanes,

·       Serene hill stations and picnic spots ruined by overcrowding,

·       New luxury homes resembling museums because they are so full of beautiful objects.

There is ever more of everything. 

Add! Add! Add! Make things more complicated! Addition is rampant, mindless. This is the modern life style.

Dr. Laurence Peter of Peter principle fame gave an example of this trend taken to its extreme. He wrote of a hydraulic butter box inside a huge refrigerator for keeping butter warm, hailed as a major improvement when all that is required is to take out the butter first thing in the morning. At room temperature, it easily spreads on toast and bread.

We all of us have a basic instinct to add and to hoard. It is easy to visualize additions. Plus, there is our tendency for loss aversion. Losing what we have affects us much more than gaining something new. So, we keep merrily increasing our pile of worldly goods.

How about moving in the reverse direction? Deduct. Delete. Edit. Parse. Simplify. Minimize. Declutter. Forget. Withdraw. Disengage.

Difficult to visualize and takes the same effort as addition. May be more. But it is a way of thinking which yields beautiful results: space, emptiness, freedom and spiritual awakening. Less is indeed more.

Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) has talked of driving and restraining forces leading to an equilibrium or ‘freeze’ in his field theory of human behaviour. Loss of equilibrium leads to tension till refreezing takes place. The obvious way is to add to the driving forces for this purpose but reducing restraining forces works even better.

A lady was visiting her parental house. She saw that both her brother and his wife were continuously exhorting their teenage son who was due to appear for the 12 standard and competitive examinations to work harder. The lady remembered her own Physics textbook when she had appeared for the examination decades ago. It was her favourite book because it had very good examples, explanation, a witty style and a logical flow of ideas. She searched for it, found it and offered it to the boy. He did not want to look at it at first as he did not have time. Soon however, he was hooked. She could feel an almost visual lessening of the tension he was labouring under. He applied himself to his studies with renewed zeal and went on to crack, not the board but JEE Main examination.

Everyone has heard the adage: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is attributed to Kurt Koffka (1886 – 1941), a psychologist who also, like Lewin, belonged to the Gestalt school of psychology. What Koffka had actually said was that the whole was something else than the sum of its parts. He clarified repeatedly that he was not talking of a principle of addition as the whole could be less than the sum of its parts. But our common fondness for addition has resulted into the misinterpretation passing into received wisdom today.

Thus, subtraction does not come naturally to us. Whenever it has been done consciously, it yields great results. Urban planners and architects, political scientists  (NOTA option in voting) and self-help gurus like Marie Kondo will all agree.

(Musings based on the reading of Subtract, the untapped science of less by Leidy Klotz, Flatiron Books, N.Y. 2021)