I am laying on the cold ground, listening to some chill and soft classical music with my eyes closed. My imagination is depicting a gigantic white pale paper hanging on the wall, and I wonder about minimalism.
There is one question that is turning around in my head:
“Is minimalism just a fashionable way to live an empty life? Or does it add a certain value, by the act of removing?”
Although this may sound paradoxical, the last one is the conclusion I always come up with when thinking, reading, watching, listening, studying and trying to apply minimalism to my life.
When I think upon minimalism, there’s always an image that comes into my mind: the one of a glacier. A bluish and whitish massive, solid yet plastic, imposing mass of frozen water that slowly comes down into the sea. If I would give minimalism a physical image, this would definitely be the one.
But why?
There are some words I would like to underline; they would help me to explain the image. The first one is slow: minimalism is linked to time, as you feel it is not endless, so you need to give things a meaning, and I mean a concrete meaning. Then there’s imposing: the enormous mass of frozen water gives me the idea of solidity and strength, that does not change with small things. Then I would say water: it is as calm and pure as it may be fierce and dirty. It is fluid, powerful, flexible and plastic; in a certain way, it is paradoxical. Nonetheless, how many times has silence been louder than noise? And how many times has simplicity been stronger and more direct than adulteration?
Minimalism is about all of these words I have just written. You only need to translate them in your own language. Find your own image. Give a sense to it. It is by removing the dirty ice of the surface that you’ll find the purest one at the core of the glacier. The one that was always there.