“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs

A sage once said “you can never be free as long as you own anything.” It’s another way of saying that the more complex our lives, the less real freedom we have. We are constrained by owning a house, a car, jewelry, anything. The house requires attention and upkeep, the car requires maintenance, jewelry requires a safe and insurance. No matter what possession you might have, it doesn’t liberate, it shackles.

Work, family, friends, hobbies all add to the constraints. They fill our days and clutter our minds. Most are good things that are necessary for a full life. But, it’s important to recognize the compromise we’re making. In order to have these things we have to sacrifice our freedom. We have to preoccupy our thoughts. We have to invest our limited time and energies.

Our political beliefs, our laws and social mores, and even our religious/spiritual practices constrain us. They point in particular directions, limiting the available choices. As important as these things are they keep us on a straight and narrow path disallowing a great deal of personal expression and variety of action.

One solution is to simply abandon everything and become a hermit and move into a cabin in the woods like Thoreau. Another is to become a monk or nun. But for most of us these “solutions’ are not “solutions’ at all. We’d be miserable or we’d starve to death and we know it. For most of us these “solutions” are simply not feasible. So what are we to do to simplify and obtain greater freedom.

Our culture, our lifestyles, and or work preclude any meaningful simplification. So, how do we keep it simple. One simple solution is contemplative practice. Meditation, yoga, contemplative prayer, tai chi are all basically methods to simplify experience. What could be simpler than meditation, sitting quietly paying attention to only the present moment. What could be simpler than yoga, adopting positions mindfully and observing your breath and bodily sensations in the present moment. What could be simpler than contemplative prayer, concentrated attention in the present moment on a deity. What could be simpler than tai chi, paying attention in the present moment to very slow movements and balance.

Just focusing on the present moment by itself is the great simplifier. It excludes the vast body of memories that we call the past where the roots of much of our complexity reside. It excludes the future and all the complex planning, worry and fears involved. Present moment awareness is the essence of simplicity.

A wonderful aspect of contemplative practice is that the beautiful simplicity carries over from the practice into our everyday lives. We begin to approach all aspects of our life with greater simplicity. We start to look at it as a present moment experience rather than something with containing a myriad of associated meanings, interpretations, judgments, and history. We can learn to strip that all away and just see it as it is.

We can learn to bring that simplicity to our emotional lives, simply experiencing our feelings in real time. We can strip away all of the rumination, fear and anxiety about our emotions and just experience them as they are. How simple!

So, engage in contemplative practice and “keep it simple stupid”, in the face of the complexity of the modern world.

CMCS

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” ― Henry David Thoreau