Dreams of Simplicity

The dream of simplicity:

Living off the land, near a quiet brook, where you grown your own food and milk your own cow?

Having no bills, no cares, no concerns over the future. Being able to simply work a job, get paid, and go home to your nice comfy house?

Poetic simplicity:
Being able to walk beneath the moon-lit stary sky without hearing your neighbor's TV blaring (or their latest argument).

I've been reading Thoreau's "On Walden Pond". It is a book I've had many years, and wanted to read. He wrote only one or two things that have come down to us in history, but he is famous for Walden, and his essay "On Civil Disobedience." Apparently Thoreau was calling for Civil Disobedience because of his firm convictions on the evils of slavery. It is interesting, when he wrote his book in 1854 there was no concept of slavery being a northing thing as opposed to a southern thing. He was a northern and he was trying to appeal to his fellow northerners about the evils of slavery, and having NO SUCCESS at the time. His written works were very controversial, and he lived like a popper because of them.

But, I digress...

Walden is an essay that Thoreau wrote when he wanted to live the simple life for a couple of years and "went out into the woods, and built a cabin, and lived next to a pond." Well, his book is very interesting because of the many amusing things he say and because of the way that he stands in the face of contemporary society (something that my Fly counterpart is very up on...) Walden is a book, therefore, that people interested in "simplicity" are very fond of. It is also a book that people who are interested in civil disobedience (or just plain living in stark contrast to popular culture) are always interested in.

Some interesting tid-bits about Walden: Thoreau lived there for two years, but he wrote the story as a polished adventure of one year duration so that he could use the seasons to make a progression through the book. A very nice literary device: but the reader should beware at once, this book is really FICTION and not fact. He's relating the things he learned to you, but in a fictional manner.

There are some important behind-the-scenes facts:
* His neighbors hated him at the time because he managed to start a forest fire shortly after he build his little cabin, and burned up some 100 acres of woods.
* He wasn't out in the middle of the wilderness living on public land, but was actually only 2 miles from town, living on property owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The main point of his essay, however, was the fact that people didn't need so much to live. He seemed to feel that a person could work 2 or 3 days a week and that was plenty sufficient. The reason people worked so much more than that, and so much harder was because they had bills to pay, because they were trying to "get ahead" - trying to constantly expand their crops, constantly expand their property, and so on, so that they could gather more wealth, so they could buy more and live more luxuriously.

Sound familiar?

The problems I have with Thoreau, however, is that he was a perfect hypocrite. He didn't own the land he was living on, and he was paying no rent, so it really doesn't prove to anyone how it is possible to live simply. Wouldn't he have been working a 6 day work-week also, if he had to pay a monthly mortgage or rent for the land he was using?

I have many dreams of simplicity, but no illusions. It is hard, hard work "living off the land." You get up at 5 AM to feed the animals, and got to bed exhausted every night after a 12 to 14 hour day of work. As much as I want to dream that THAT is the simple life, I certainly have my reservations.

Cheers!
Basil

Einstein on Simplicity

I found this over on my other blog while searching the archives (from way back in 2003):

A thought for the day...

Everything should be made as simple as possible--but not simpler.

- Albert Einstein

Simplicity and American Culture

This post is related to my recent discussion on American culture at my FlyInTheHolyOil Blog.


Two important things about simplicity. It is also:
A. Freedom from excess commercialism, and
B. Freedom from excess consumerism.

I will be addressing these two issues in more detail in a subsequent post.

Basil

A couple of thoughts from a reader

(and friend)

Sue posted the following two insights that are good enough to go on my main page:

"simplicity has become an endeavor... to step back from the fast-paced, constantly-moving, constantly-entertained, buy-buy-buy, me-centered, society that we live in today.

-and-
(from a friend of Sue's)

"I want to simplify not only my life, but my mind as well."


Thanks Sue!

Regards,
Basil

Simplicity - a definition

Here's a couple of my own definitions for Simplicity:

SIMPLICITY:
i) The synthesis of all of life's valuable complexities into a holistic system.
ii) Freedom from the entanglements of all of life's detrimental complexities.

KISS

Today's buzzzzword for simplicity is: KISS.

Have you never heard of it (and I don't mean smooching) before?

KISS is an acronym used in the computer industry (and elsewhere) for Keep It Simple Stupid. Well, I'm the first one to admit, it's not nice to call anyone "stupid" or "dummy" or other such things, but we seem to have become comfortable with these epitaphs in American society.

The idea behind KISS is to write the simplest code that will get the job done. Even when you are architecting complex systems, you try to think about the implications of added complexity, and boil things down to their essence, so that you can design software that follows the KISS principle. If it is written and organized in a manner that is "simple" as in: (a) easy to follow, (b) easy to decompose (c) easy to repeat and reproduce (d) easy to implement, then you will be building better software.

Now I noticed when I started this blog that there is a lot of material to be found on the internet when you google for simplicity. A lot of it has to do with management, and business operations. It seems like the more complex a business organism is, the more they are pushing for simplicity. But it also seems like, in some cases, you end up requiring more documentation, more technical artifacts in general, when you try to simplify things.

I've noticed there is a coincidence between this phenomonon in the business world and my personal life. The more simple things are on the surface, the more complex they are beneath the surface. I think that the attainment of simplicity is a true artform. Just as the greatest and most simple artworks of antiquity (take Mona Lisa for example) are incredibly complex, so is life in general.

Let me extapolate to the phenonmenon of simplicity in living. What do you think of? Going back to our historic roots? Farm life, family living, living off the land? Well it turns out, as I've found in my studies, farm life is extremely hard work and tedious: as is living off the land. There are tons of new skills you must learn to supplement the old ones. In fact, such simple living is far from uncomplicated. Just taking care of a horse, for example, is a discipline that seems like it is far beyond my potential skills and comprehension.

Where am I going with all this? My point here is that behind simplicity is a collective complexity. Simplifying life is not about throwing everything out, but it is about organizing everything: organizing everything in such a way that with all the complexity life becomes fairly simple to live day by day.

Cheers for now!
And K.I.S.S. And I mean it!

Basil

Found on a Fortune Cookie

It is interesting, I started this blog last night, and this morning, at lunch, my fortune Cookie (we had Chinese) says:

Simplicity and clarity should
be your theme in dress.

What makes this particularly interesting is that I have often thought along these lines. When I finally found a style of clothing that I "liked" in my young adulthood, it turned out to be a very simple style:

SOLID COLORS.

I now pretty much exclusively wear solid color t-shirts (Eddie Bauer has these nice ones that are durable and comfortable, sometimes with pockets, and in nice natural colors.)

I also have been wearing sandals now for about 10 years uninterrupted (except by a brief business trip I was required to make to Cleveland, for which I bought a pair of closed-toe shoes.)

Strange that I should get this fortune cookie today. Today, I'm wearing my Hawaiian shirt. Well, it turns out that the only time I violate my "simplicity" rule for dress is when I wear outlandish things like: t-shirts with interesting sayings on them, or tie-dye and Hawaiian style shirts.

It is this diversity and complexity that I love so much and refuse to give up for all my focus on simplicity.

Cheers!

~me~

Simplicity

I have long been on a quest for simplicity.

I'm not sure what it means. I look up simplicity and simple at m-w.com and I find that it means such things as: plain, naive, or foolish all the way to lucidity/lucid, clear, concise.

I think I mean none of those things.

I have always wanted life to be simple, but it becomes increasingly day-by-day complex. The complexity I live with can best be seen in the numerous blogs I have linked from here. So many different facets to my life, and all of them seemingly disjointed and unharmonious.

Nevertheless, I insist, I am on a quest for simplicity. It is on this page here that I intend to document that journey.

Regards.

~me~