I’m kind of blown away by how complicated life has gotten! My heart sometimes aches for simpler time before technology, social media and a world filled with too many choices.
Watching TV requires multiple gadgets, memberships require multiple passwords, and billing statements have multiple pages. Public restrooms require multiple numbers to open doors.
With social media, my business has suddenly become everyone’s business.
- who to trust?
- how to trust?
- whether to trust?
Hard questions when the whole world is your neighbor.
The truth is I seem to default to the complicated, turning simple questions into complicated answers, simple explanations into complicated excuses, simple virtues into complicated moral dilemmas.
When all is said and done, don’t the simplest admonitions make the most sense?
- Play fair
- Don’t hit people
- Share your toys
- Tell the truth
- Don’t be rude
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours
- Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody
- Clean up your own mess
I remember as a junior in high school reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book about simple living in natural surroundings. It seemed, at the time, like a far-fetched notion, and yet I was attracted to the idea of seizing personal independence.
”If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me, there would be nothing worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”
What Thoreau was suggesting is hard to accomplish but the very striving for simplicity has its own medicinal virtues.
Sobriety has been my Walden Pond, an ever present reminder to lighten my load of excess baggage and live in the moment where what I need is right in front of me.
“The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Ahhhhh, but when I’m released to the simple, how sweet it is.
Just a thought…
Pat
[Originally published March 24, 2018.]
Copyright © 2018 Patrick J. Moriarty. All Rights Reserved.
Always love Thoreau saying, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” And of course wondered why he could not have left it at “Simplify.”