Readings

About simplicity and simple living

On this Web site, “simplicity” and “simple living” will dance with each other like an old married couple: Comfortably close to each other, moving slowly, content just to be together. “Simplicity” encompasses just about any human enterprise that’s engaged upon with relative ease, or that’s relatively easy to understand. “Simple living” is any part of daily living that can be made more understandable, more manageable, more joyful.  Here are some other ways to think about this old couple:

Simple living is as much addition as subtraction.
You may already understand the “stop doing this” part of simple living.  But when you’re living simple, you also add to your life what got pushed aside in the hustle-bustle of accumulation.  Some simple-living adherents would even invoke the idea of “multiplication”, the repeated addition of things like serenity, calm, spare time, quiet, ease, possibility, joy, satisfaction, hope, friendship or savings.

Simple living isn’t usually flashy. 
Most of the joys of simple living aren’t super-charged. When you declutter and slow down, you don’t get trapped into a razzle-dazzle identity or mindless frolicking.  Deep joy hangs around like the scent of lilacs on a summer night.  Extraordinary pops out of ordinary like the seeds in a sunflower.

There’s more to simple living than meets the eye.
If you keep at it long enough, simple living ends up as an insightful way of thinking and being. When you engage in purposeful simplicity, you’re not blinded by the mind-numbing stresses of the kind of “good life” that drains money or energy.

Anyone can do this.
Great intellect, wealth, power or spirituality are not requirements for living simply.  If you’re not forced to live this way, simplicity is a choice you can make without having to know much more than that you want to stop being foolish about the way you’re living now. 

Simplicity and simple living, still dancing together after all these years!