Simplicity

 Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, 

but when there is nothing left to take away.

If your mind is anything like mine, it sometimes races forwards and backwards anticipating the problems to come and rehashing the past.  Of course this takes away the pleasure of the present moment, such as listening to an opera or trying to sleep at 3 am. 

Living in the moment sounds easy, but observing non-judgmentally as life unfolds is hard, especially  with all the distraction and exhaustion of technology and city living. It's no wonder that practicing "mindfulness" is becoming trendy these days. The New Yorker Magazine recently published a tongue-in-cheek article on "enlightenment" Silicone Valley style.  Click Here.

There's even a Mindful Magazine, sort of a companion to that fat, advertisement-stuffed Simplicity Magazine you see at the supermarket.  I subscribe to Mindful, but I don't think I'm getting my money's worth. Ha.

The excerpt below is from Thoreau's writings while he was living at Walden Pond.  While most of us can't spend the entire morning sitting in the doorstep gazing at Nature, how about this idea of keeping your troublesome "affairs" down to a short list of two or three?  



"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail …

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome
and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the
companion that was so companionable as solitude …
If one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hour …

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us. Sometimes, in
a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my
sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the
pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and
stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through
the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the
noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time."

From, Walden
Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau house replica, Walden Pond