[Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Citizen for Oct. 14, 1998.]
The subject comes up periodically, this time at a church women’s retreat focusing on Anne Lindbergh’s book, “Gift from the Sea.” The first chapters urged us to simplify our lives, discover ourselves, take time to meditate.
I did not do well with this study. For one thing, to simplify implies, to me, a shedding of excess baggage, ridding myself of material possessions and the busyness that clutters my day. And I am unwilling to let these things go.
Like many of my sisters for so we became in this time of bonding to each other I long for a time when my life can be pared to its essentials.
An older member of the group remembered her grandparents, farmers without electricity, laboring from dark to dark with bare hands and bent backs for little more than subsistence, then sitting contentedly together at day’s end. They expected little from life, yet were so much more at peace with themselves than most of us are today.
A single woman in her middle years said she wants to sell her two-story home, get rid of Call Waiting, and move to a house just big enough for herself. A Chinese screen and a futon would take the place of the suite of extra bedrooms she maintains now for the few guests she entertains.
Simplify, simplify!
My dream is to rise with bird song, sip coffee over the newspaper, meditate for an hour with good music filling my soul, meet a friend for lunch, take a walk, read a book, then prepare a simple meal to share with Dave, before swinging on the porch listening to the tree frogs.
No more deadlines, no meetings, no have-to’s and ought-to’s, no malfunctioning modems, no missed appointments, no complicated tax forms, no registrations, no pencilling in, no stretching myself to try to fit a piece of me into an impossible maze of directions and obligations.
Is this what I want? What am I really willing to do without?
For all our whining about the machines cluttering our lives in the name of laborsaving, which would we jettison first? The washer? The bread maker? The laptop? The answering machine?
Why are our lives so busy when we have a small fortune in time-saving devices at our beck and call? One answer may be that our lives are busy BECAUSE we have time-saving devices.
If you had to pound out denim jeans on the rocks in a stream, or iron cotton dress shirts with a flatiron heated on a stove, you know as well I do that you’d order your daughter and husband to wear them for at least a week between washings. It’s BECAUSE you can toss wash-’n-wear clothes effortlessly into washer and dryer that you do multiple loads of wash per day instead of one big tub-full per week as your grandmother did.
It’s BECAUSE I can flip e-mail notes to friends and sources instantaneously that the volume of my correspondence has increased at least 25 times what it was when I had to write a letter, address an envelope, find a stamp, and walk to the mailbox. And the added benefit is a degree of connectedness with members of a global community that far exceeds the relationships Grandma could maintain with a month-long turnaround of letters to relatives gone West.
Call Waiting allows me to go ahead with a second call when I’m working on a story, and not worry that the county commissioner who must return my first call will be blocked by a busy signal. For me, that’s simpler.
And was it less complicated to get information from the Library of Congress by purchasing a ticket to Washington, finding a hotel, figuring out public transportation or calling a cab, checking in, seeing a librarian for directions to find the material, then copying the desired data, and reversing the process to get home two days later?
Compared to double-clicking a browser, typing in the subject, and downloading the information? I don’t think so.
Yet that “simplification,” of course, requires some training, expensive electronics, enough hard drive and RAM, a fast-enough modem, and the right software.
You get the idea. We swap one complexity for another in the name of simplicity.
My efforts to simplify will not likely go beyond basic de-cluttering. I began by skipping the seashell angel-making craft session at the retreat.
Doo-dads do not fit a simplification plan.
I’ll bag up excess books for the library sales and weed out kitchen utensils I don’t use anymore. I’ll give my daughter stemware still packed for our last move — 15 years ago.
But don’t make me give up my beloved stuff, my pottery, my favorite CDs, my computer playthings. If that’s what it takes to simplify, I’ll keep my complex life. That’s where I “discover myself.”
And don’t ask me to discard the friends whose love elevates mere existence to life, albeit a complicated life.
But I might try to find more time to enjoy them, friends and stuff alike.
Ah, to simplify, simplify!
