simplicity

I just had dinner at Mieko and Tomatsu's beautiful wooden home. They served me good, healthy, hearty food. I now feel warm and full.

To eat with them reminded me of a way of living that I forget when living all by myself. A way of enjoying little things and not getting your head mixed up in the unnecessary complications that all too often seem to surround us in the world today.


Not to say that the natural world is not fully complicated, rather, to point out that human life can be less complicated if we only try.

Being 22 years of age, soon to be 23, I've found that there are many ways to imagine my life. There is the one that is anxious to get a move on and become what I am bound to be. Then there is another that says life is not something to be rushed through. Life is not a thing that exists so that we can get it over with, so to speak. It should be something that exists so we can actually experience it and not rush through it.

Life has its way of picking you up and not dropping you; you lose almost all control for many months at a time. You even start to wonder if you are living your life at all or if you are just a ghost in the machine that is your body (and a ghost that has little control of that machine). Creating simplicity seems to be the step that can make you be a little more active in actually living your life. But because of that it can be difficult. Many people around you will also resist your desire for simplicity, especially in the form of peer pressure (both direct and indirect).

I, of course, am no specialist in simplicity, nor am I a specialist in really anything except maybe moving around the world and being a good friend whenever I can. A lot of time though is spent worrying about how and when my focus in life will ensue. Perhaps I should just focus on living a pure and simple life. That seems to be a pretty challenging and worthy quest in this day and age when everyone seems to be racing to reach the next step. It sounds like the same old "live in the now" argument doesn't it? Perhaps I am trying to take it to a new level in suggesting that it is a verifiable and challenging quest simply not to race through life, especially youth.