“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” — Henry David Thoreau
Life can be fast paced and chaotic. In the pursuit of a successful career, getting the right qualifications, keeping up a social life and just generally working towards your goals, you can end up feeling depleted and overwhelmed. Simplicity brings you back to what is truly important to you by slashing through the clang and clutter that fog your thinking and weigh you down.
Falling into simplicity
Cutting out the things that make life more complex begins with discovering what it is that you truly value. This process involves increasing your awareness. Susan Murphy Roshi, teacher at Zen Open Circle, Sydney and Melbourne Zen Group and author of books Upside-Down Zen and The Whole World is Medicine, says, “Simplicity is actually quite difficult because it’s much easier to fall into complicatedness than it is to fall into simplicity. You have to let simplicity find you. You have to make yourself available.”
One way of letting simplicity find you is to quieten your mind. A regular meditation practice helps with this process.
“When you allow your mind to grow less busy and more still, a little bit more space appears between thoughts,” says Murphy. “The main way to get clear in your mind is to sit with your spine upright and follow your breath. Just breathe in with awareness of breathing in; breathe out with awareness of breathing out.
“When you pay your breath your full mind, your mind becomes more like the breath: it becomes more flowing; it doesn’t cling to anything any more; it doesn’t even wish to cling to anything. If you tried to cling to anything you’d be holding your breath.”
If you find following your breath a challenge, take heart. “Sometimes sitting with the breath is not so easy,” says Ajahn Khemaravo, Buddhist monk at the Wat Buddha Dhamma Forest Monastery.
“The mind doesn’t switch off because it’s not conditioned to doing nothing. It’s always kind of prodded along to do things, to plan things out, to comment, to have inward conversations, and that gets pretty tiring. That’s why people get a bit grumpy and depressed — they’re overworking their minds. During meditation you let it slow down, rest a little bit. And the slowing down comes through letting things be and accepting things the way they are.”
Eastern philosophies aren’t the only ones to recognise the benefits of sitting in silence. In 17th century Britain, as a reaction to the increasing complexities of the high church, some Christians sought a return to the simplicities of early Christianity. It was in this context that the Quaker movement emerged as group that sought a direct inner experience of the spirit through silent worship. During silent worship, Quakers develop their own beliefs through personal experience, which they can share with the group if they want to.
“Our worship is very simple,” says Quaker Ian Hughes. “We just sit around in a circle and somebody may or may not stand up and say something. In my case it’s led to theological simplicity. I see much more value in the simplicity of Quakerism: you don’t need dogma; it’s about how we live our lives; it’s about compassion.”
Being in right relationship
The Quakers live by five broad “orientations of action” that they call “testimonies”. These testimonies encompass simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Like everything else that Quakers do, the testimony of simplicity is lived out according to the individual.
“The testimonies are a really important source of happiness for me because nobody is telling me what to do,” says Hughes. “But I have these attractors that lead me to go deeper within myself, to feel and to experience what is in right relationship — which is a phrase that Quakers use. And so for me it’s about being in right relationship with the Earth, in right relationship with other people; it’s about being in right relationship with myself. Being in right relationship is also about being more human and I find that it often involves simplicity.”
For Khemavaro, meditation is how you “make peace with whatever has happened. So you’re making peace with things, the people around you, the situation around you. It’s not just a skill; it’s not just a technique that you do. It’s actually an attitude of mind, an attitude of relating to the world.
When you have a strong, regular practice, “It builds up a momentum, it builds up this kind of muscle of the mind to be aware and not get caught up in emotions. So if, for instance, you’re in a stressful relationship with a co-worker, you’re better at understanding things. You can complicate the situation and make it worse or you can be aware of your body, your speech. Sometimes you do a kind of tango, a dance with certain people: they say something and you say something and pretty soon the situation takes a turn for the worse. With more mindfulness, you can respond to the situation more skilfully and develop better relationships.”
“In relationships it’s important to be straightforward,” says Quaker Elaine Polglase. “Straightforward is another word for simplicity and simplicity is also focusing on what’s important.”
Beth Dargis, who educates people about living simpler lives, would agree. She says, “If you’re only focused on productivity, then growth and character and relationships become less important. Even just how you’re being throughout the day is more important than what you’re getting done. Some people can get a whole bunch of things done but they are just so bitter and angry that you don’t even want to be around them.
“So I think character is really important. It’s one of the ways that you can tell if you’re simplified enough — if you can be calm and not always on edge and hurrying.”
Decluttering
“One of the main ways that you can simplify is to declutter,” says Dargis. “Too much clutter drains your energy; a lot of visual stuff around makes you more tired, overwhelmed and it’s harder to think.
“The main problem I see most people doing is they declutter here and there and they can’t see any progress. So if you start with one small spot like a cupboard and clear that out, you can actually see some progress.”
In his book Happiness Now Andrew Matthews writes, “Psychological tests show that people suffer more stress in cluttered houses and cluttered offices. In clean spaces we feel more relaxed and energetic. Healthy rivers flush themselves out. Trees drop leaves and fruit. Your body feels better when you clean it out. So does your house.”
“In the past couple of years one of the things I’ve done is to get rid of a lot of stuff out of my house because I want my life to be a bit simpler and not have as many things around,” says Hughes. “But simplicity is not the same as poverty; it doesn’t mean you don’t own anything. It means that you generally don’t have unnecessary things. Your focus is not on accumulating — that’s not how we measure what’s worthwhile.
“I had chairs in the house that people didn’t sit on and they had to be dusted and looked after. And I also had a huge collection of books and, after I retired, I decided that I would just keep the books that I was fairly sure I’d be likely to read in the future and get rid of the others. And that meant I reduced my book collection from around six or seven thousand down to less than a thousand. Now it’s easier to find the books that I want to read because they all fit on one wall.”
“We’re surrounded by so much stuff, I think it’s a secret misery,” says Murphy. “Not just physical stuff; mental stuff, too. It distracts, it whisks you away into some strange, trance-like state that is ultimately empty in a totally different sense [from] the Zen sense of emptiness.
“When meditators talk about emptiness they’re not talking about a desperate nothingness. They’re talking about being free of any sense of separation from anything at all. That’s very different from saying the world is empty.”
Rearranging the way
“What you find in real simplicity is ease, not easiness,” says Murphy. “It’s like the mind becoming extremely receptive and yet not judging anything as better or worse than anything else. That is the way back to a genuine experience of what simple might be.”
Zen teachers and practitioners use koans to help them transcend their understanding of what it is to be human. “They’re often described as paradoxes but they’re not paradoxes. The thing about koans is that they rearrange you back to a state of simplicity.
“It’s a little bit like the way that you look at a powerful painting. It’s not so much that you look at it after a while, as you let it gradually work on you. It rearranges the way you see. You can’t actually take a koan and do things with it in any of the usual ways. They look strange but, in fact, they’re very direct routes into reality because they speak from the ground of simplicity: direct experience without anything getting in the way.”
Christmas Humphreys, who founded the London Buddhist Society in 1924, said a koan was like a man walking in the desert with a pebble in his mouth: “It does not quench existing thirst but it stimulates the means of quenching it.”
One generally well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“There’s no clapping in the original,” says Murphy. “It’s just ‘What is the sound of one hand?’ You can actually see the way that people try to do something with the koan. They put in the word ‘clapping’ to try to make sense of something. The sound of one hand is a very mysterious koan and I would do wrong by it to even talk about it because I’d be stealing your experience. But once you penetrate the koan with your own understanding, you find your own unhesitating response to it. That’s different from finding the ‘answer’; it’s like coming into synchrony with the koan.”
Simplifying time and finding elegance
Being in synchrony with a koan can help you to understand what it means to be you. And when you get back in touch with the real you, it can sometimes come as a jolt that what you spend much of your time and energy doing is actually unnecessary.
“I no longer mow the front and back lawns in my garden,” says Hughes. “And the grass grows knee high and that’s much simpler and there’s also much better insect and bird life in the garden. And it’s not using the lawn mower which means a little bit less pollution.”
Dargis says that we need to streamline our lives so that they are more manageable: “Manageable is different for each person. But if you’re always in the car taking the kids to activities, that’s probably not manageable. And you may need to limit the number of hours you spend on the internet or at work.
“Most people don’t like limiting themselves. They think it’s negative; it has a bad connotation. But really, if you aren’t living within your limits, that’s when a lot of stress comes in.
“There’s a good book by Gill Edwards called Pure Bliss that explains how time can be broken up into soft time and hard time,” says Dargis. “Hard time is when you work, work, work, strive, strive, strive; soft time is when you relax and then you can become present in the moment, which leads you into focus time. She suggests moving between soft time and focus time.
“Most people alternate between hard time and lost time. Lost time is when you’re trying to relax but you’re really just zoning out, such as when you’re mindlessly watching television or surfing the internet. And it just creates stress because all of a sudden you need to do something and you don’t have enough time now — it’s all rush, rush, rush.”
There is nothing rushed about Zen art and that is the Beauty of it. Take a simple brushstroke, for example. “If you’re using a brush and you’re straining to do something, that strain will show in the brushstroke,” says Murphy. “But if you’re allowing the brushstroke to just be, and there’s as little as possible of you in that brushstroke, it’s elegant and beautiful. You immediately sense the difference. There’s no betrayal of strain in it at all.
“That’s what happens quite naturally in Zen art and architecture and poetry: the strain of the self is lifted off and out of the way. Great care is taken, but it’s not effortful anymore. That’s a good clue, a good way of understanding what it is to be free of self in the way that Zen practice is.”
The sweetness of simple pleasures
Happiness in all its simplicity is like that, too — it’s effortless but it’s done with care. “In the media, happiness is always portrayed as something you have to go out and get,” says Khemavaro. “Something you have to find, put together, manage.
“But from a Buddhist perspective, happiness is already here. It’s in the mind. And hence the direction is inward and towards simplicity. The more you move outward, the more complex and complicated things become. You’ve got to make these complicated things do things the way you want them to be done — other people, situations, work, life, relationships. You’re conditioned to improve things, want better things, which obviously has its advantages but you also have to appreciate that perfection is another word for fault finding.
“If you clean up your mind and make it sparkle like you do with your house and your garden, just the simple things are more enjoyable. The food you eat, you can actually enjoy it because you’re there — you’re not texting your friend, you’re not talking or surfing the net at the same time. Just the simple things like walking around looking at nice wild flowers are all you need to do.”
“When you learn to meditate, you can fall quite rapidly and directly into a very sweet state,” says Murphy. “You can be shocked by how familiar and at home you feel within moments. Another thing that can equally happen either immediately, or a little bit further down the track, is you become aware of just how cluttered and busy and relentless your mind is in tossing up possibilities and preferences and wanting to do anything but be exactly where you are, as you are.”
At least Henry David Thoreau was happy to be exactly where he was when he wrote, “If the day and the night be such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.”
Positioning with nature
“The world is overflowing! It’s an extraordinary place,” says Murphy. “Zen meditation and practice is very much about being here and finding out that we have a perfect fit with it. It’s not a problem to be here. There’s nothing that we need to escape from. Any difficulty, including the fact that there will be pain and loss in your life at times turns out to be what really makes us genuine.
“The most simple thing on earth really is the way that the biosphere works. It’s enormously complex, but it’s a huge series of essentially extremely simple interactions that create a whole. And we’re the result of untraceable billions of these extremely simple interactions in evolutionary terms.”
Hughes, whose academic interest lies in complex living systems, has a similar message: “Human systems are enormously complex, particularly when you try to work at the level of systems as a whole and you avoid dissecting things and looking at only one little bit of the system and instead look at the interaction of everything with everything else.
“And yet, what I’ve found is that there are two principles. One is that complexity arises out of repeated iterations of simple processes. So the complexity emerges from simplicity. At the root of the complexity is simplicity. Second, if you want to work in those complex situations, the way to do it is to look for simple heuristic groups, simple guidelines that you can try out, test, get feedback on.
“So I used action research. Action research operates on a simple force that you plan what you’re going to do, you implement that, observe what’s going on, reflect on that, and then reevaluate and replan. So you have this simple, four-step cycle, which enables you to deal with huge complexity.
“The ecosystem itself is a complex living system. And the human impact on it is enormously complex. But we can do simple things that start something like a chain reaction; things that start something that might ripple out. It’s not about doing heroic things; it’s about living in a way that can have positive repercussions right through the system.”
“Life is either complicated and getting more complicated, or it’s simple and getting simpler. The main thing is to move from the first state to the second,” says Deepak Chopra in his book The Ultimate Happiness Prescription.
Having more direct contact with nature and the food you eat by growing your own vegetables may be what simplicity is to you; for others, the work and organisation involved in doing that just makes life more complicated. The point is to find your own way to simplicity and know that it is the right way to decreasing complications and opening up the space that you need to live your life as a human being — and not just a human doing.
Penny Robertshawe is a freelance writer based in Sydney, Australia.
