small life, slow life

It’s Vacation Friday for me today, so I just wanted to stop by and give you some quick links that I love. I hope you all have plans to slow down and rest this weekend. It looks like the weather is going to be beautiful – I’m considering a beach trip on Sunday!

Leo Babauta wrote about why killing time isn’t a sin.

What about joy? What about the sensory pleasure of lying in the grass with the sun shining on our closed eyes? What about the beauty of a nap while on the train? How about reading a novel for the sheer exhilaration of it, not to better yourself? What about spending time with someone for the love of being with someone, of making a genuine human connection that is unencumbered by productive purpose, unburdened by goals. What about freedom? Freedom from being tied to a job, from having to improve yourself every single minute, from the dreariness of neverending work?

Karen Salmansohn wrote about renaming “free time” as “priceless time.”

I know right now there are some very smart inventors out there trying to create more fancy-shmancy devices to save you more time, like “time-saving” resources on the Internet and “time-saving” doohickeys for cell phones and BlackBerrys. But you don’t need any more time-saving devices that quickly morph into schedule-clogging, mind-clogging and feeling-clogging devices. Instead we need more “time-savoring devices” which help us slow down, sit still and become more mindful of who we are and what we value for a fulfilling, happy life.

The founder of TreeHugger created an apartment that cultivates smaller, slower living. (I love it! My man and I only have 400sqft ourselves!)

“Small is sexy,” he says in his six-minute TED talk. A YouTube hit, with 1.3 million views as of this week, it also includes these aphorisms: “Transfer ownership to access,” “Own as little as possible so you don’t have to store too much” and “Editing is the skill of this century: editing space, media consumption, friends.”

And I absolutely love the notion of this front-yard free library. One day, I’d love to build one of these myself!

Will you give yourself a vacation day this weekend?