Want a Simpler Life?
What does it take to live the simple life? More stuff? More rituals of various kinds? More complications in our lives?
One of the things modern, sophisticated people are especially good at is making most aspects of our lives much more complicated than they really are or need to be. So when we decide a simpler life would be the solution to what we see as life’s problems, we jump into action. We make lists of what we think we should do or stop doing. We think of possessions we need to get rid of, or others that promise to simplify our lives. We take action, assuming that more doing is the key to simplification.
Can you start to see the layers we add to our lives when we attempt to simplify them? More doing, more getting, more getting rid of, more planning, more fixing, more, more, more, more, more. We follow a pattern that keeps repeating itself, and just complicates everything.
What’s become clear to me is that it’s not possible to have simplicity without silence.
Can you see how all the activity, all the doing and getting, takes you away from silence? The noisier our minds become, the more complicated everything seems, and simplicity gets lost in the shuffle.
Here’s another example of that. The faster your thinking becomes, the more revved up you feel, the less time there seems to be. When your mind slows down to the speed it was made to operate most effectively, the concept of not enough time never occurs to you. Though we’re talking specifically about time, what we’re really talking about is another example of making our lives seem more complicated, and less simple. “Not enough time” doesn’t really have much to do with the amount of time at our disposal.
Silence is more than just a lack of noise from external sources. Silence is the absence of noise generated by thinking, and especially by overthinking. What’s left when the internal noise and the external noise die down? Peace is what’s left.
In a sense, peace and simplicity are different names for the same thing. The beauty of silence is that it allows new things to come to the surface. New thought, new ways of seeing, new perspectives. All of those may visit us when we have a noisy mind, but they get lost in the noise, so it’s as though they never showed up at all. Anything new is invisible to us because we’re conditioned to respond to noise, not silence.
Silence is the birthplace of everything new; every new thought, new idea, new “take,” new perspective, is born from silence. It’s interesting that so many of us resist silence and do everything we can to get away from it. When we attempt to banish silence from our lives, what we’re unknowingly doing is holding new thoughts, ideas, and perspectives at arm’s length, away from where we can see them, respond to them, and benefit from them.
What does it take to live a simpler life? Less. Less noise, less thinking, less inventing high stakes that don’t really exist, less drama, less commotion, less assigning significance to events and thoughts. Once I became accustomed to less noise, and more silence, it was astonishing how easily and quickly I adjusted to the peace and creativity that took the place of all that noise.
