In times of difficulty, make it simple. 

This is the guidance I received recently on a day where my mind was whirring away trying to account for everything that could possibly go wrong. For all of the ways I might be negatively received by another. A time of trying to fit all the puzzle pieces of protection together to create a picture of certainty.

It seems to be the nature of the ordinary mind to over-complicate and over-exaggerate in its desperate need to try and figure everything out. To try and have all the answers where quite likely the need for those answers arises precisely because of what the mind is doing in this regard. It also needs to be said here that this facet of the mind has been at the heart of figuring out complicated and complex problems that we all face. And yet, left unchecked, this very same aspect has also created many, many of our personal and social ills through its need to over-think, over-do and over-complicate.

We can readily see this in conventional medicine where more and more interventions create side effects and complications all their own. And where if a more simple approach and perspective was taken around what creates health, we would see more clearly what is needed, as opposed to coming up with more and more ways to chase symptoms. In so doing, creating harm that wasn’t even there to begin with. Nor even necessary, if we had only been more simple and humble in our approach.

Less certain and arrogant in our assumption that our complicated standards of care were the gold standard of the world.

We can also see complication that harms in the ways that more and more generations of the technologies are being imposed on our lives. Where the time-saving “convenience” we have been promised has turned into a full time job of managing passwords, platforms and apps. And how often it is we are consumed with just trying to deal with all of the intrusions and the demands of keeping up.

More to the point, keeping up with a whole bunch of things we never even asked for, and where the exchange of greater and greater complication for the promise of better living has grown increasingly false.

To complicate is to obfuscate the truth. To complicate is to distract, distort and detract from the beauty of our lives. To complicate is to create the wrong ideas about who we are, what we need and how to live. To complicate is to erode our well-being and the experience of being alive.

For the longest time, I had a button stuck to the back of the visor in my car that read:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

While this was a plea to be more conscientious around our resource use, we can, for our purposes here, extend the meaning.

Live simply that you may know ease.

Live simply that you may know peace.

Live simply that you may know what is true.