Every day is a new day…to simplify
Finally, I have time to do all the things I’d planned to do “someday.” Finally, I can continue on my road to simplicity.
There’s that word again. Simplicity. I guess it took a pandemic to help me and thousands of others get to this point of renewed commitment to simplifying. Less running around, going and getting, planning and doing, meeting, greeting, comparing, commiserating, wishing, dreaming, wondering. More doing–cooking, sewing, gardening, reading, writing, yoga-ing. How about just be-ing?
I read a famous quote by Thoreau today that I thought might fit here. But, ironically, it was fairly complicated. He can be quite wordy, and, to my irritation, does not use gender neutral language. Here it is anyway:
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen…In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and the thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify. Simplify.”
As we know Thoreau did, indeed, simplify. He went to extremes to have less, do less and take up less space. Is the life he created at Walden Pond even possible any more? Is that our future?
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