Simplicity’s Pleasures

This morning, as I turned to rise from bed at my usual very early hour, Carol, reached her arm over me.  Since her day usually ends two hours after mine, and thus her day usually starts later than mine, her moving from a deep sleep to do this was a surprise.  I resisted my schedule-driven impulse to get up anyway.  Of course, I had tasks on my day's to-do list, but the bit of perspective my years have finally broken through to give me made me hesitate.  For the next half-hour (I've made progress, but not THAT much), I simply enjoyed her touch, her warmth, and the quiet pleasure of still having her beside me after nearly 53 years of married life.   No thoughts occupied my mind, no sounds other than her breathing.

When I logged on to my computer soon thereafter, I was met with the usual cacophony of "bombshell" headlines and "breaking news" articles about everything from who won and lost the recent government shutdown battle, to how we could stop the Chinese from dominating the coming 5G market, the latest mass shooting, and "Alessandra Ambrosio's style transformation."  The images on my laptop changed in dizzying fashion, testimony to the assumption that attracting me with distractions was essential to keep  me online - and that my attention span was as fleeting as the images themselves.

I am no luddite.  I enjoy the possibilities technology provides, yet this pair of contrasts at the start of my day makes me realize that the complexity and pace at which I usually choose to live too often deny me the simplicity and slowness  my life also needs.  "Our life is frittered away by detail," Thoreau put it, "simplify, simplify."  Easy for him to say in the nineteenth century, when there were no 24/7 news, social media, and smartphones, and the woods surrounding Walden Pond offered such a close, quiet escape.

Yet simplifying is a state of mind, an act of will, not just an orchestrated part of a day or something we can only do in the woods.  It is a realization that our bodies and souls need time away from complexity to heal from its demands and dangers.   It is the practice of shutting out the noise of nonsense, whether through meditation, moments of mindfulness, or just turning away from the screens in our lives to enjoy the sun outside our windows.  It is also the acceptance that, at our life's center, the simple moments are often the ones our hearts will remember and cherish.  It is also the understanding that simple truths can be richer than convoluted conclusions.

Emerson, a contemporary of Thoreau, used to ask a friend he had not seen for some time: "What has become clear to you since we last met?"   Simplicity allows our minds to rest and opens us to clarify what they have learned and what matters.  It puts material things in perspective, helping us see and adjust, as Wordsworth put it, to the fact that "the world is too much with us."  Simplicity, as my mother-in-law once insightfully put it, forces us to ask the question about the trials and stresses that so consume our anxiety and energies: "will this matter at all five years from now?"

The ability to enjoy simple pleasures and to simplify can fruitfully be applied as well to address troubling challenges in our lives.  It won't help us construct spreadsheets to manage our bills and financial future, nor will it heal the medical problems that require science and the skills of professionals.  But the ability to  spend moments in simplicity may help us decide how important the financial commitments we are about to make really are and whether the lifestyle we are living is creating the health issues we fear. 

Simplicity, from another perspective, is not the opposite of complexity but the product of  successfully grappling with it.  It is the ability to find the core of an issue or one's life amidst a seemingly insurmountable cascade of facts, distractions, and detours.  As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: "For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life."

In the end, I fear, I talk a better game than I play.  I sometimes love the complexity of the world - and the complexity I create - too much.  But in moments like the start of today, when I lay in darkness and joy, I capture just enough of the value of simplicity and simple pleasures to remind me that I would do well to find and relish more of both.

Photo Credit: Walden Pond, by Pablo Sanchez