Perhaps, that is one reason we yearn for the simple life. In a way, we want to be children, to let someone else carry the awkward backpack of responsibility.
We are like wheat, here on earth to ripen. We ripen intellectually by letting in as much of the universe’s complexity as we can. Morally we ripen by making our choices. And we ripen spiritually by opening our eyes to Creation’s endless detail.
One afternoon I picked up a fallen leaf from the sugar maple in our yard. Up close it was yellow, with splashes of red. At arm’s length it was orange. Its color depended on how I looked at it.
I knew a little about how this leaf had spent its life, transforming sunlight and carbon dioxide into nutrients, and I knew that we animals breathe that oxygen that such plants emit, while they thrive upon the carbon dioxide we exhale. And I knew that each cell of the leaf has a nucleus containing a chemical—DNA—upon which is inscribed all the instructions for making and operating a sugar maple. Scientists know far more about this than I. But even their knowledge extends only a short way into the sea of complexity that is a sugar maple.
I’m beginning to understand, I think, what simplicity means. It does not mean blinding ourselves to the world’s stunning complexity or avoiding the choices that ripen us. By “simplify, simplify,” Thoreau meant simplifying ourselves.
To accomplish this, we can:
Focus on deeper things. The simple life is not necessarily living in a cabin, cultivating beans. It is refusing to let our lives be “frittered away by detail”. A professor taught me a secret for focusing: Turn off the TV and read great books. They open doors in your brain.
Undertake life’s journey one step at a time. I once met a young couple both blind since birth. They had a three-year-old daughter and an infant, both fully sighted. For those parents, everything was complex: bathing the baby, monitoring their daughter, mowing the lawn. Yet, they were full of smiles and laughter. I asked the mother how she kept track of their lively daughter. “I tie little bells on her shoes,” she said with a laugh.
“What will you do when the infant walks too?” I asked.
She smiled. “Everything is so complicated that I don’t try to solve a problem until I have to. I take one thing at a time!”
Pare down your desires. English novelist and playwright Jerome Klapka Jerome caught the spirit of that enterprise when he wrote, “Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe too, enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink, for thirst is a dangerous thing.”
Not long ago I flew home to see my father in the hospital. He has a disease that nibbles away the mind. I was a snarl of worries. Treatments? Nursing homes? Finances?
He was crouched in a wheelchair, a shriveled, whitened remnant of the father I had known. As I stood there, hurt and confused, he looked up and saw me. And then I saw something unexpected and wonderful in his eyes: recognition and love. It welled up and filled his eyes with tears. And mine.
That afternoon, my father came back from wherever his illness had taken him. He joked and laughed, once again the man I had known. And then he was tired, and we put him to bed. The next day, he did not remember I had come. And the next night he died.
Every death is a door opening on Creation’s mystery. The door opens, but we see only darkness. In that awful moment, we realize how vast the universe is, complexity upon complexity, beyond us. But that is the true gift of simplicity: to accept the world’s infinite complication, to accept bewilderment.
And then, especially, we can savor simple things. A face we love, perhaps, eyes brimming with love.
It is the simplest of things. But it is more than enough.
那一年，九月的下午，我们五对夫妇各自慢悠悠地划着独木舟，沿着缅因州的萨科河顺流而下，沐浴在夏末的金色阳光之中，无比惬意。岸边的小鹿，啃着小草，摇着白色的尾巴，注视着我们这支小小的船队漂流而过。晚上，我们搭起了帐蓬，烤着牛排，围着篝火懒散地躺着，睡眼朦胧地凝望着满天繁星。有人弹拨着吉它，唱起古老的歌曲：“淡泊乃是天资，自由乃是天赐。”
当然了，田园牧歌式的漫游告一段落，我们又驱车回到这个世界，还贷款，忙工作，还有洗衣机塞满了脏衣服。偶尔我也会情不自禁地哼唱：“淡泊乃是天资，自由乃是天赐。”我多想活得淡定从容，可哪儿去找呢？
