I have developed a deep and abiding desire for simplicity lately. However, this desire of simplicity does seem to always interfere with my desire to acquire “stuff” in my pursuit of happiness . My Motto for the past year has been "make it simple."
I started with "keep it simple" but quickly realized that my life was not yet simple, so how could I say “keep it simple”, when I needed to first "make it simple". Now I realize that once life becomes simple (I have not yet surrendered to the idea that it can never be simple), the task changes into preventing the natural sequence to complexity.
I look back into the past. Into the nineteenth century, and say, “that was a far simpler time.” Therefore, I am puzzled when I read that Henry David Thoreau, a nineteenth century man, struggled with the desire to simplify his life as well. It was because Thoreau struggled with the complexity of life that he “went to the woods”. He did this “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
SIMPLIFY. SIMPLIFY. SIMPLIFY.
Thoreau writes of the misfortune of those that inherit farms and implements, the stuff of 18th century life. He explains “…these are more easily acquired than got rid of.” He tells the story of a deacon who died and an auction was held for all his possessions, mainly those pulled out from the basement, and pulled down from the attic. These were sold to men who were going to drag them home in order to store them in their own basements and attics until they too died. Then again they would be pulled out from the basement and pulled down from the attic and sold at auction again. I do believe I may have had some of those very same items stored in my very own garage….
Within the year, (having perhaps complained too many times over too many years about all the stuff in the garage that I couldn’t park two cars in my two car garage) our now adult children will organized a yard sale at our house. Now my wife and I have had these events in the past: carefully sorting through the stuff of life and deciding what would go in the sale (most did not go).
Our children will haul everything out of the garage and then remove all their leftover items that they want or need. Then with what is left, will then required my wife and I decide what we would take back into the garage – and explain why, right there on the spot. This will be a very painful process, but truly a way that only very few things made their way back into our garage. I think that we should get an early start! (Maybe Tuesday morning, with the sale on Saturday morning...?)
Everything else that did not make it back inside will be sold or trashed. At the end of the yard sale, there will be more money in our coffers, our driveway will be clear, and two cars will fit in the two car garage! With this sale, we will not miss anything that we no longer have. “More easily acquired than got rid of.”
Learning, Learning, Learning.
Another one of my tutors of the bookshelf, Richard Foster (in Celebration of Spiritual Disciplines) wrote: “Simplicity is the only thing that sufficiently reorients our lives that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us.” This thought started a process of introspection: “Why was I seeking simplicity?” To be certain, I was bothered by the stuff of life. And, yes, I was bothered by the bills that resulted from acquiring, repairing, and maintaining the stuff of life.
I wanted simplicity. Maybe simply because I didn’t want to be bothered with any of the items collected during a fifty year old man’s lifetime. That did not seem like a truly noble enough goal. Just having less stuff seemed some what un-American, to me! Time to fall back on my European roots.
As I continued to reflect upon Richard Foster’s statement, I slowly began to realize that it was my possessions that were destroying me. Simplicity soon was no longer the goal, but the means to a goal – the goal of enjoying life to the fullest. It was, almost a complete circle back to the reason why Thoreau went to the woods. In short, I wanted to live deliberately.
William Wallace says in Braveheart, “all men die, but not all men truly live.” I wanted the dash on my tombstone, the dash between birth date and death date, to be a truly significant and meaningful dash, not merely a blank line offering separation between the two events.
This began a further refinement, a centering of the soul; a change from simplicity meaning the mere reduction of clutter, the de-cumulation of “stuff”, through a process of reducing the activities in which I intentionally engage, into a process (yet incomplete) of determining what is most important.
I chose to live deliberately; I desire to fulfill the purposes for which I was uniquely created. This line of thinking began to move me from the “stuff of life” that could be counted, boxed and stored to the other “stuff of life”, those things I occupied my time doing.
Within a manufacturing environment “simplify” is to eliminate non-value added activities, that is, those that do not satisfy a specific customer requirement. Within the environment in which I now work, the same principle applies – we can only eliminate those things that do not satisfy a specific customer requirement. Sometimes they don’t seem to know, except that “we’ve always done it that way”. So our processes are effectively blocked from being simplified.
In my life, what are the “specific requirements” that I have? What is it, in my personal life, which effectively blocks simplification? Unless I understand those, I cannot achieve excellence through simplicity -- I will simply divest myself of “stuff”. And if I do not take into account my beloved spouse’s requirements, I risk far worse consequences. It is life itself that I seek, not mere existence. Trying to reduce my “specific requirements” has been a difficult, on-going, task.
Here I found help in another tutors of the shelf, David Whyte (The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America who wrote this:
If we have little idea of what we really want from our lives, or what a soulful approach to our work might mean, then often the only entrance we have into soul comes from the ability to say a firm no to those things we intuit lead to a loss of vitality. This way is traditionally known as the via negativa, or negative road…. The via negativa is the discipline of saying ‘no’ when we have as yet no clarity about those things to which we can say yes!
Douglas Adams wrote much about the great question of life, the universe and everything (the question whose answer is 42) in his Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. When dealing with the quandary of this answer, Adams has his advanced computer explain: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is… so once you know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”
It seems, whether a nineteenth century philosopher or a twentieth century science fiction writer or a corporate poet – all circle around the same fact that Alice faced before the Cheshire Cat. If you don’t know where you want to end up, then it doesn’t matter which direction you go. Until I know what my “specific requirements” are, I cannot reduce the non-value added activities….
Making something simple is very difficult.
Making my life simple is even more difficult.
Finding Other kind of Answers can be simply difficult.
But the true point of beginning seems to be: knowing what I want out of life. For me, that process has included the saying “no” when I lack clarity about those things to which I can say “yes” to.
This has been a difficult transition, an incomplete (as yet) transition. Have I “missed out” on occasion? Yes -- a glorious yes, a resounding yes, and even a simple yes. But it has eliminated a lot of pointless busyness out of my life. It has allowed me to slow down.
I open a Lowe’s catalog and covet. I open my Best Buy weekly flyer and covet. I visit Barnes and Noble and drool as well as covet. My process is not complete for there is still the coveting. But I make no purchases based upon my coveting. I wait at least 24 hours. I have discovered I really can live without “that” – the last 24 hours proved I can in fact “live without it”.
Another "small" step or habit now out of my life, that I can now share with everyone is that I do not smoke anymore. With all the simplifying of late, it just seemed to fit. So I did it, with help of patches and pretzels, I am now 8 weeks smoke free this morning, Feels Good to be Free!
This past fall and early winter, each very cold Thursday evening a good friend and I would go to Borders for a hot coffee and thirty minutes of friendship. We would go to visit together, and we would visit with our friends on the shelf, as we talked about life en all.
There were many times I would resolve I wanted to purchase something, determine to do so the next Thursday, and by the next Thursday wondered why I was so intrigued by that object just the week before. Perhaps that is why my garage had originally filled up with “stuff” purchased for $10 and sold in a yard sale for $4. As I have intentionally sought to simplify my life, both the material “stuff” of life and the immaterial “stuff” of life, I have discovered that I enjoy my present possessions more. The pursuit of simplicity is reorienting my life so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying me.
In my introspection I've determined that what I want most is a rich soul life. I wish to nourish my soul. The puritans had a saying, “Acquire thy soul with patience.” That is what I have been in process of doing. Even before I knew it had a name.
David Whyte wrote: “… we understand that though the world will never be simple, a life that honors the soul seems to have a kind of radical simplicity at the center of it.”
I like that expression “radical simplicity”. I am in process. Simplicity is not the goal, it is the means to the goal of a rich and fulfilling soul life. Excellence of life is the goal, excellence through simplicity of Other kinds of Answers...
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