Minimalism Documentary Quotes

Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. This is the first book that they wrote together. Everything That Remains is their second book that they published after the development of their own publishing house known as the Asymmetrical Press. Minimalism is a documentary that they produced on their favorite topic. The duo also hosts a podcast entitled The Minimalist Podcast

Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our nature?

Coming back to your answer about violence, when I heard what you said in the documentary, I thought about Palestine. The international community and the Western media are always asking, as a precondition, that Palestinians stop the violence. How would you explain the popularity of this narrative that the oppressed have to ensure the safety of the oppressors? Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice. This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

As many Americans watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all Burns did—not to minimize it, because it’s such a feat—is take 130-year-old existing information and weave it into a (very) good story. Burns once described perhaps the most important part of his storytelling process—the music that accompanies images in his documentaries: I went into old hymnals and old song books and I had someone plunk them out on the piano. And whenever something hit me I’d go, “That one!” And then we’d go into a studio with a session musician and probably do thirty different recordings. Burns says that when writing a documentary script he will literally extend a sentence so that it lines up with a certain beat in the background music; he will cut a sentence to do the same. “Music is God,” he says. “It’s not just the icing on the cake. It’s the fudge, baked right in there.

One night I happened to come upon a documentary called Facing the Storm, about the buffalos in Montana. Robert Thomson of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discussed how buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain.