It seems like one of the problems with accepting the simple life is that it’s just too simple.
It seems too easy.
It seems like that can’t be right.
Can life really be simple? There’s so many distractions and complications that so easily fill so much of our time that it seems hard to accept that the answers to everything we need in life could really be simple.
And really, when you see people presenting “Hey, I figured out life.
Just follow my simple plan, and your life will be great”: We can definitely be very skeptical about that, naturally.
And so we can dismiss the idea that there’s some defined simple plan that will solve everything.
But it’s still hard to accept that life can actually be easy and simple.
I have a hard time accepting it.
But if we imagine that we only need very simple things, then life is correspondingly simple.
Because life is only as complicated and elaborate and demanding as our needs and desires are.
If we have a desire to become the richest person in the world, have a life of fame and power and luxury, or whatever our loftiest dream is, then there’s a lot of work to be done, there’s a lot of difficulty, there’s a lot of obstacles that get in the way of us achieving this lofty goal.
If we want everything, we want to be the best in the world and have all these things, we’re going to have a complicated life, because it just takes so much to get those things.
Whereas if we literally wanted nothing, and we literally did not care if we even lived or died, then life becomes very simple, because it’s like “Well, I don’t even need anything at all.
Whatever happens happens.” The complexity just disappears right away.
Now, completely not caring about life or death, I mean, that seems to be going too far.
Of course, that is giving up our chance to have a wonderful life, if we just don’t care at all.
But it shows that our level of complexity in life is based on how much we need.
It’s needing things that creates complexity.
It’s wanting things that creates problems.
We want to achieve a certain goal: so many steps.
We have these possessions: now we have to worry about keeping them.
Anything that becomes- we have these very specific ideas about how we want our life to be: now we have all the task of making life become like that and stay like that, and resisting all the the threats to that way we imagine life, and things are changing, but we’ve got to make sure they don’t change too much, so that we can keep it the way we want it.
So we make complexity in our lives from having these high goals.
So I have a hard time accepting that it’s OK to simplify these goals.
It’s OK to just want to have a simple life.
It’s hard for me to accept that that’s OK and that’s enough.
But if we imagine that all we need, at least as a baseline of something that we need, is just the simple, basic, natural needs for life: suddenly life becomes a lot simpler, and we don’t need to pile on complexity.
And maybe one of the obstacles that we have to overcome is simply the expectation that “Of course life is going to be complicated.
Of course there’s going to be lots of difficulties and drama in life, because that’s life.” Now, I don’t believe we can ever completely clear out complications.
There’s always going to be surprises and difficulties, no matter what.
But it’s amazing to think that really, if what we want is very simple, then the level of complexity we need in life is very low.
And although we cannot completely eliminate problems, it may even be possible to have an actually simple life, where there just isn’t that much to worry about.
Even as I say this, I have a hard time imagining that it could actually be true.
And yet maybe part of the challenge is simply to imagine that it could be.
#simplelife #lifeissimple #simplicity