"Simplify, Simplify"
Simplify Simplify
Robert Marby Doss
June 3, 1984
Last summer, walking through a craft and art show in the common of a small New England town, I noticed a slate on which someone had lettered and painted words. From Henry David Thoreau:
“Our life is frittered away be detail. Simplify, simplify.”
I recall telling someone back here in Wilmington at the end of the summer about seeing that quote from Thoreau.
And the one I told answered with some disagreement:
“Life is complex, not simple. There is something wrong with this country – oversimplification. Everywhere. Over-simplification in politics, which is dangerous; over-simplification in religion (look at ‘creationism’), which is stupid.”
I’ve thought about this since then and have felt: Yes – it is true. Life is complex. “Make life too simple” can degenerate into simplistic escapism: 1. The denial of evil because one doesn’t want to see it. 2. The running away from responsibility because it would be easier for someone else to do it. 3. The “eat pie in the sky” now because tomorrow we die anyway” philosophy. Over-simplification. Such so-called simplifications” should be rejected along with the overdoing (or oversimplification) we meet in ideas. 1. Free love, for example (love was never free). 2. Complete and free individualism: individualism is not complete (nor is it free without responsibility). 3. Or democratic socialism, communism, anti-communism, perfect-democracy – each idea can be an oversimplification requiring further analysis.
Escapism into unreasoned foolishness should be rejected whether it comes in politics, religion, business or the bottle.
But ALL escape is not bad.
Ask anyone who is enslaved to something or someone. And, escape from the control of our lesser or baser instincts, drives, self-deceptions into a greater freedom to fulfill potential and embrace reality. That is healthy escape.
Escape from self-involvement into simple human cooperation – away from the “I” and toward the “We–“
This is to approach some simple basics of wisdom in living.
I told you about reading the book describing America’s best-run companies, the book, In Search of Excellence, earlier this year.
IT was interesting to me that the overarching truths about these companies were simple things:
The researchers found that the excellent companies were “brilliant on the basics. 1. Tools did not substitute for thinking. 2. Intellect did not overpower wisdom. 3. Analysis did not impede action (did not become as one of our members put it, “analysis paralysis!”).
“Rather, these companies worked hard to keep things simple in a complex world. 1. They persisted. 2. They insisted on top quality. 3. They fawned over their customers. 4. They listened to their employees and treated them like adults. 5. They allowed some chaos in return for quick action and regular experimentation.”
Simplify.
Simplify – so say the best-run companies.
People like Jeremy Rifkin in his book Entropy, and earlier, Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, have insisted that we must return to some basic simple wisdom or do ourselves in.
The physical facts of life speak to us today of “terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution, exhaustion” and wealth and power and physical know-how will not save us if we do not turn to some more important basic- simple values first!
The old religious language put it: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things (the material things, which you also need) shall be added unto you.”
But the religious language cannot be comprehended today in such a way as torturing people to pay attention to it. No longer does it make sense to modern humanity. The language can be changed, however. The truths are the same.
Our world needs ways of life that give material things their due and proper place but not first place. The EGO will have to take a back set to the ECO-system.
And, humanity needs justice, fortitude, and the temperance to know when “enough materially, is enough.” The good, the true, and the beautiful have to become the highest aims of social and individual life.
Schumacher says: “Everywhere people ask: ‘But, what can I actually do?’ [Little Old Me?] The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: We can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.”
Seek ye first the community of human compassion, and then such material things as are needed may be added.
Simplify, Simplify.
But … if we simplify our existence, may not we become lazy? Some, maybe yes, but lazy is not all bad.
There’s a difference between lazy and being unplugged.
I get in more trouble with myself for being driven than I do for being lazy (work on something ‘til I drop and have to recuperate so I can go out and drop again. That’s not good.) It would better to be lazy – go at it slow and easy – get it done, but not ferociously.
A lazy person – may be a person with composure – at peace with his or her own soul. A buzzing-bee-hearing, lightening-bug-watching, dreamer may be dreaming a dream worth the dreaming – or thinking things over before significant action.
Oh, to be able to be lazier.
Simplify. … Simplify.
But, a person who is unplugged is a sloth! And that’s something else!
Such a person doesn’t know what they feel or smell or taste anymore. They just hang down. Hang Down people on computer-control and its battery is weak. … Something is wrong (they know that), but don’t do anything about it. They’re “out to lunch” or, out on a limb!
People come by: “the window shades are pulled down in the windows of their eyes.” They aren’t getting the light. They’re tuned out. Things are just going on around such an individual.
She or he is merely getting through life, not living it. He or she, as far as personal engagement with life is concerned, is inoperative, unplugged.
Rather than the unplugged, tuned-out, shades-down, automatic pilot way, choose LAZY any day.
Simplify. … Simplify. … And then act.
And the next day or the day after, you’ll get going. Natural ebullience will cause you to reject boredom.
I looked again in one of my favorite collections of vignettes, Friddell’s Jackstraws because I just knew the right illustration would be there – the anecdote to put things in their proper perspective, the headed-for-summer lesson in priorities, to simplify – simplify.
Guy Friddell tells it this way:
“When I was shaving one morning my five-year-old marched in and said, ‘Daddy, when did you play baseball?’
‘Oh, a long time ago.’
‘But when?’
I dreaded for him to find out when.
‘When’ was when the boys in my neighborhood played the Hollow Gang and had to have nine players. They stuck me in centerfield, way out where they figured I’d do the least damage and the right fielder played in toward the middle.
There was lots to do out there, though. You could sit on a rock and fish for tiger worms with a wild onion stalk. Sometimes, I’d sit four innings at a stretch in the lazy sun, not even bothering to go into bat or even ‘get up’ until somebody slammed the ball over my head. It was a depressing sight, too, that ball bouncing away toward the pasture creek like a hopped-up rabbit, and hard to find, like an old moss-stained boulder.
I’d poke around down in the creek, out of sight, and presently notice how a big rock placed at just the right angle would change the course of the channel and then add a little sand and blue clay from the bank and before you knew it, you got the start of a dam and then put this rock over here, by George, and –– about that time there’d be a shout from the bank above and I’d see the heads of the other two fielders dark against a white-spun cloud.
‘Come on down!’ I’d yell. ‘And give me a hand with this confounded creek!’
They’d slide down the bank and the three of us would work like fury hauling sand, moss, and rock until up in the pasture somebody would send the shortstop to find out what was delaying us. Then the first baseman would just come to check on him and then the pitcher because it was HIS baseball, after all, and pretty soon there’d be 18 of us down there in the cool water building that old dam.
I was a great center fielder.”
Simplify.
There are so many reasons, simple ones, to celebrate being alive. Hearing stories is one of them. How good it is to muse, amuse, and smile.
And, reading is good. Reading, oh, I know the lives of some writers were dismal, that that maker of streams of word-music, Dylan Thomas, drank himself to death – 11 days straight into that not so good night – into death; that some writers killed themselves and bathed literature in their gloom. But, look at those who lift us up some in spirited gloom, like Lincoln, those who believe in life, who stir our sympathies, and strengthen our spines. Not Pollyanna, mind you. Life is not always grin, but sometimes grim. And I confess to loving some pretty dismal things myself.
I have always loved rain – just loved rain, don’t know why and don’t care. I performed weddings outdoors for 18 years before it rained on the first of them in the 19th year. We stood out in the rain and did it anyway. And, I love gargoyles and grotesqueries, carve them, put them on my walls and the somber etchings and lithographs of Kaethe Kolliwitz.
I even like Hieronymus Bosch!
But lovely landscapes, mountains and trees and waves – and the faces of wisdom and of kindness – the scenes of peace and the colors of compassion. I love those too, don’t you?
And music? There are sad musicians and composers, some great ones – (and) bright spirits – and either way – MAY – pick us up out of disquiet.
How often do you whistle? Or hum? Or enjoy hearing someone else do it? Songs are everywhere –– even when you wake up too early in overload; too much on the mind:
Listen, hear the morning birds singing
as though the world were
going to go right on winging and the sun break through to stitch a warm memory against the chill of next winter.
I saw a thick wisteria vine climbing up someone’s front lamppost on the way to church and Clematis on another lamppost on the way home. It made the drive over!
There are so many good reasons, simple ones, for celebrating the being alive, and I haven’t mentioned the most human of them … human trust and love. … So many reasons – for the young, the middlers, and the old!!
Max Ehrmann, the poet who wrote the familiar Desiderata, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.”
Ehrmann also wrote other poems and for the sake of a healthy simplicity, here’s one to end on. Let me read it as a meditative prayer. Will you join me in that spirit:
“Work well done and its just reward,
sunshine, rest, and love … these are the
Desiderata of happiness. In one fashion or
another we see them somewhere afar
in our path; and the vision keeps us in good
humor with the world and with
ourselves. ‘Sometime,’ we say, ‘we shall
come to our own … sometime.’ And
meanwhile life grows stiller and stiller,
rebellion settles … great
ambitions turn to simple things. Though we
have been roughly awakened from
the intoxication of youth’s enchanted
visions, if we have learned our lesson well,
may we still find a cheering ray of light
in the shadow of evening, and go with calm
faces among our neighbors and our friends.’”
Amen.
