Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, December 06, 2024

“Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.”  -Henry David Thoreau

When my daughter was about six years old, a neighbor had a few girls over for a playdate and did something so brilliant it became a touchstone for me: With nothing to offer in the way of refreshments, this mom put bandanas on the girls’ heads and had them imagine they were so poor that a couple of hard boiled eggs was all they had to share between them – that, and the clean water they were lucky enough to have. Hello, genius!

Celine came home as if her world had shifted. We were poor, mom. We didn’t have enough to eat. Little House on the Prairie and WWII Europe had colluded to transform a handful of 1^st graders for a few hours. They could relate to the value of a single piece of Christmas candy. A cracker split in two. This early lesson in simplification and gratitude, delivered via the imagination and without the constant stream of snacks and drinks, had landed.

With cervical kyphosis (tech neck) to prove it, I know I have been staring down at my phone too much lately. Whether reading articles, answering texts, or scrolling, the fact is, these seemingly insignificant detours slowly take us hostage. My attention span for actual books is down, and distraction is up on all fronts up. As I type this, I kid you not, a frowning emoji comes to mind.

So here I am, wondering yet again what not having a smart phone at all would be like, and reminiscing about the great telephones of my youth, rotary jobs without answering machines. The world was not always with us then, at least not in the sense of our being available night or day for anything that could skid into our limbic systems. Recipe “alert”? Storm coming in? Sale about to end? Urgent offer about courses to help you simplify your life? Robo-call, random text from a stranger? It’s no surprise that people are opting for “dumb phones” – simpler same-number versions of a phone for calling or texting only, harkening a-a-a-a-l-l the way back to, say, 20 years ago.

To be honest, the tech neck is simply a reminder of everything – all of it — that might need more paring down in my life, a situation which, in reference to the above, I’ll call Little House Syndrome – where simpler things start looking really good.

Humanity has been talking and writing about simplifying for thousands of years from Lao Tzu (“Manifest plainness. Embrace simplicity….”) to Mies van der Rohe (“Less is more.”). At the forefront of more recent movements are people like Richard Gregg  in the 30s, who coined the term “voluntary simplicity,” Duane Elgin (Voluntary Simplicity, 1981) and Elaine St James (Simplify Your Life: 100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things that Really Matter, 1990). Today there innumerable websites to help one pare down and recognize simple goodness.

Though a pain in the neck is my personal cue to look around at what is complexifying my life, there are questions we can all ask, especially during the holidays when the more-is-better quicksand — which is more like sugar — starts pulling us under.

We can pay attention to how our body feels (exhaustion, headaches, stomachaches, laziness) and how our physical space feels (cluttered, messy, dark). We can drop in on our feelings and the words circulating in our brains — overwhelm, being a victim, lack of motivation, being hard on ourselves, saying Yes too often. And we can pay attention to our brain health in terms of actual sleep, nutrition, hydration. Are we getting too caught up in details, consumption or other people’s lives? Are we remaining flexible so that little things don’t drag us down? Are we trying to control too much? Eat too much? Have too much? Tick off too much?

A single healthy step, like slowing down for a moment, can often lead to the next healthy one – like appreciating something or someone. Though simplifying sometimes requires discipline, discipline itself can be a form of getting-to-the-essence simplification. The goal is simply to elevate what is important and let go of what does not serve.

There are hundreds of websites today to help us declutter every aspect of our lives: home, media, workplace, commitments, thoughts, emotions, possessions, finances, passwords, relationships. I myself could do with a few more Little House moments in my life — maybe not fetching water from the well, but anything that resoundingly, joyously confirms how the best things in life are not only free but also truly simple.