Make It Simple

 

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.

 

Body, Mind & Soul Domination

 

“Dominated.” This is the word a student uses to describe the relationship he has to his screen devices.

Even though we are on Zoom, and everyone is muted, I can feel the silent heaviness that comes over the “room.” We are all stunned into silence as the enormity of this one word settles over all of us. It’s all so powerful. All so sobering. And all so very, very devastating.

Where do we go from here? How do I even begin to help these students untangle from what we have gotten ourselves into?

No matter how many times I gather with others around the impact the technologies are having in our lives, I am always taken aback. One way or another. I am always left knowing that the technologies are beyond us. That despite the fact that we are not even close to having a handle on what we currently have, we continue to create more and more of something that is taking us farther and farther away from ourselves. And each other.

Farther and farther away from what it is to be human.

At this point, we all know it. Whether we cop to it or not, we all know it. We know that our use ruins a good night’s sleep. We know that we do it to the detriment of really living. We know that it is destroying our mental and physical health. We know that it is eroding our capacity to be in relationship in satisfying ways.

And we know that it is destroying the health and well-being of generations to come.

If all of this is not the makings of a world-wide addiction, I do not know what is. But because “everyone else is doing it,” it feels normal. We are literally living out now every dystopian sci-fi story ever told. Every prescient warning we ever got from those before us. And did not heed.

Enter the “Metaverse,” Mark Zuckerberg’s latest brain child. According to him, we will do everything via a virtual environment. Everything. And it’s going to be so great! So advanced. And he is so enthusiastic in the telling that it’s got to be great, right?

Now is our chance, my friends. As with everything that is happening in the world, now is the moment. Does it make sense to you to travel even further from yourself than you already have? Does it make sense to allow something non-human to further dominate you?

This is not someone else’s to do, and it is time we all got over “what everyone else is doing.” Time we all got over abdicating responsibility to those making money off of us.