• Simplify your stuff. How can you expect newness, freshness, and surprises if every square inch of space in your home and every corner of your mind is filled with “stuff”? It is beneficial to leave room around you for something mysterious to take place in life. Consider how your “stuff” may be a burden or may keep you trapped because it identifies you with the past, and with a limited definition of who you are. Consider whether or not you would like to make a change here. Try giving a bunch of stuff away and learn what happens.
• Simplify your diet. How natural, fresh, and true to their original color are the foods you currently eat? Foods that are cooked simply or eaten raw tend to supply many more nutrients than those that are “worked over” in a variety of ways. Refining your diet in this way can have profound effects on the quality of your entire life.
• Simplify your life. Look carefully at all the ways in which your energy is being used, and note especially where and how it is being drained away. What might happen if you simply said yes when you meant yes and no when you meant no?

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction; it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity. —Boris Pasternak

• Take time to rest your mind. Use nature as a source of healing, and meditation or prayer as a daily practice for keeping attuned to what is important. When the big picture is kept in the forefront, the little things just fall into line.
• See your loved ones as brand new every day. After living with people for years, adults or children, it is easy to develop the notion that you really know them. And in some ways you do. Yet it is a trap to always anticipate their reactions to certain things. Doing that almost assures that you will get just what you have expected. Acknowledge that human beings are much more complex and mysterious than that. There are always surprises to be uncovered, always new depths of appreciation that can be explored. Allowing someone else to be brand new may start with pretending or imagining that you are meeting them again, for the very first time. It works.
• Watch your language and your thoughts. Expressions like “I’m too old for that...” should be red flags, signaling you to become a beginner again.
• Turn problems upside down, especially health problems. Instead of assuming the attitude that problems are things to be fought against and conquered, try playing with the notion that an illness, or any other problem, may be a friend or a teacher at this particular time in your life. “Listen” to what this challenge has to teach you, or what it forces you to practice—like patience, courage, or creativity. Don’t consider problems as something “bad” or “good”—just as “different” or “interesting.” Admittedly this attitude isn’t easy to hold when times are really difficult. It takes gentle persistence to turn problems around and to make this approach to handling upsets a way of life. Why not begin now?

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