Readings

Simple living as techniques

An aspiring young musician practiced the piano faithfully almost every day after school. His teacher insisted on at least ten minutes of exercises–routine musical fragments that strengthened finger muscles and improved eye/hand coordination. She trusted the best techniques to make the best musician out of promising talent. 

By the time the boy reached adolescence he yearned for something more. He knew that music was more than the mechanical skills he had learned so well. For awhile he wanted to play cool jazz, then ragtime and Dixieland. He wanted to be able to improvise, to string chord progressions together into new foundations for new melodies. But he was trapped by his own faithful practicing, and knew down deep that he would forever be a well-trained performer without the soul of a real musician.

When it comes to living simply, we could distill the whole matter down into practicing disciplined actions. We can start there, of course, because simple living is more than just having good thoughts. We do have to recycle, we must learn to reuse things, and certainly we have to reduce our debt, our polluting behaviors and our hurried lifestyles. But after we’ve acted our way into thinking, what is it, really, that we’re thinking?

If we’re going to take simple living beyond its easy-to-caricature stage, we can’t be content with techniques that may have little soul to them. Our brains are more than rational-thought generators; deep and compelling emotions drive us past cherished thoughts about cherished propositions or values.

To take simple living beyond techniques, we have to hear the music of God’s own making: the soulful lament of the Earth and people who are ground into dust by poverty, as well as the dancing tunes that evidence joyful gratitude for God’s blessings of every kind. We have to see ourselves joined to God’s purposes, God’s peoples, God’s created world. We have to discover a “musician’s soul” inside of ourselves, finding new melodies, new chord progressions, new sounds that touch the souls of others.

Otherwise, simple living could become a performance that lasts only as long as the techniques, becoming only required exercises that strengthen our hands but do not engage the minds that set those hands to work.

And wouldn’t that be a sad way to spend afternoons after school?