Here I am by the Toronto waterfront.
You can faintly see the CN tower out in the background, here in the west end.
And just decided to go for a walk down by the waterside.
There’s something about being by the water that makes me feel so refreshed.
It’s like the simplicity of it.
When there’s nothing in your vision but half sky and half water, it really helps to simplify everything.
And so much of what I keep thinking about seems to keep coming back to that.
If I can just simplify my life and reduce all the things I don’t need to be thinking about, then what I’ll be left with is all the best things.
So it’s like what I need in my life is not more things, but less things getting in the way of what’s already good.
So- whoa, here the wind comes.
I wonder how that’s gonna sound.
Well, I after breakfast went out for a walk to come down to the water, and I’m just walking around out here.
And just listen to the sound of that lapping water, the faraway traffic.
It’s like when I come to place like this, it makes me forget about all the little things that might have been bugging me.
They really become irrelevant when we just take things back to the water.
I think the water is something that’s really built into all of us to really respond to.
If you think about just the nature of life itself, we are, what is it, 80, 70-80-90% percent water, somewhere in there.
[NOTE: It’s more like 60%.] And we come from the water, the creatures.
We only stepped onto land, you know, much more recently in the history of life.
We spend most of the history of life in the water.
And even as we come to land, we’re like these bubbles of water that we carry, these little pockets of water that we carry, as we go up onto the land.
So water is something that’s just at the centre of life itself in so many ways.
And, you know, knowing that in theory, it’s not really necessary to think about the theory of it, but it just seems like there’s something about that, that by just being around the water, this feeling comes back.
It triggers some kind of primitive sense of what’s good, this kind of basic material foundation.
Water is the essence of being a living animal, a living creature.
We are based in the water.
And yeah, you know, I’m really not saying very much.
It’s a very simple message today.
Because it seems to be part of this whole thing with the water, is getting this simplicity is a part of that, that you just come down to this even level and just this very simple material, basic substance, that doesn’t even have a particular shape.
It doesn’t even have a shape.
It’s just there as matter.
(Oh, go look at the ducks.
Another joy of being by the waterside.) It’s just, you know, sometimes I find it hard to talk too much about simplicity, because when you’re really being simple, you know, what are you gonna talk about? What are you gonna say? Because there is nothing to say.
It’s like, okay, there’s water.
That’s it.
And so much of this complex journey, going through layer by layer, analyzing, developing habits, and changing, and changing mindset, all the complexity that’s in it, it just seems to come down at the end to something very simple.
So this may be my simplest video yet, and all I have to say is this is water, and I’m glad to be here.