Simplicity

Kay Rice ~ January 08, 2014

I’ve been doing a lot of observing lately.  Followed by a lot of thinking.  Perhaps it’s the arrival of a new year.  Perhaps wisdom and age are finally catching up to me.  There are times when I long for the return of my childhood roots and the cold of this winter has become one of those times.  I close my eyes and I remember the farmhouse on State Route 2.  I remember the smell of my Grandma’s bread baking in the kitchen and the smell of the wood floors and and the musty farmhouse.  Those are good memories.  I remember gathering freshly fallen snow in a large bowl and bringing it inside where my mom and/or my grandma would add fresh cream and sugar to it, mix it up and we would have a treat of cold snow-cream in frosty coffee cups.  So simple, yet a lasting memory of winter.

Simplicity, a word that seems to have become lost throughout the years.  Technology was supposed to make things more simple, but in essence it’s made it so much more complicated.  I should know, I’m a programmer in the “real world”.  My job is to make things look easy and simple to the outside world.  Sometimes that happens but quite honestly I think that in the effort to make things simple, we just made things more complicated.  We have phones that remind of us calendar appointments and phone numbers so our brain no longer knows how to remember these little facts, not to mention all the passwords that we have to keep changing to make sure some hacker doesn’t steal our personal information that we entrust into these devices.  We’ve made it simple to spend money, just swipe a card, we forget how hard it was to earn it and how to protect it.

Simplicity is paired up with being happy with what we have, with what we earn.  To understand that we don’t need the newest, shiniest gadget to make our lives “better”, more simple.  We do not need to have steak every night or the latest pre-packaged diet meal.  We can make due with what we have, the basics.  I love soups, you can’t get more basic then that when it comes to food.  It doesn’t need to be fancy, a few sweet potatoes, some black beans, some chicken stock, some rice or grain, some spice and tomatoes and you have a warming soup to fill you up and give you all your body needs.  It may not be fancy, but it’s good.  I look at simplicity as taking advantage of the seasonal fruits and vegetables and putting them up so that on cold winter days like today, I can have that sweet memory of summer.  The sweetness is doubled with the fact that it took my knowledge, skill and work to create something that I could use later.  The satisfaction of a job well done and the reward of enjoying it later.  We don’t get that today in our modern world.  The masses gulp down fast food and don’t really even taste it and to be honest its not good for you anyway.  Your body doesn’t want that garbage and it sure doesn’t need it either.  Your body doesn’t need fancy ingredients.  It doesn’t need expensive adornments.  It doesn’t need fancy gym memberships or electronics.  It doesn’t need a big fancy house filled with fancy furniture and pretty distractions.  It just needs, simplicity.

So with this thought I leave with you, as I go warm myself by my fireplace and enjoy a bowl of freshly cooked soup.  Do you know what you need from what you want?  Can you take the time to stop and look past all of the distractions of today’s busy modern world and find your corner of, Simplicity.

Peace,

Kay Rice