The Art of Living Simply
理查德·沃克尔默 / Richard Wolkomir
We paddled down Maine’s Saco River that September afternoon, five couples in canoes, basking in the summer’s last golden sunlight. Grazing deer, fluttering their white tails, watched our flotilla pass. That evening we pitched tents, broiled steaks and sprawled around the campfire, staring sleepily at the stars. One man, strumming his guitar, sang an old Shaker song: “Tis the gift to be simple. Tis the gift to be free.”
Our idyll ended, of course, and we drove back to the world of loan payments, jobs and clogged washing machines.“ Tis the gift to be simple,” I found myself humming at odd moments, “Tis the gift to be free.” How I longed for that simplicity. But where could I find it?
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” That dictum of Henry David Thoreau’s, echoing from the days of steamboats and ox-drawn plows, had long hunted me. Yet Thoreau himself was able to spend only two years in the cabin he built beside Walden Pond. And Henry—wifeless, childless, jobless—never had to tussle with such details as variable-rate mortgages.
My life attracted detail, as if my motto were: “Complicate, complicate.” And I’ve found I’m not alone. But one day my thinking about simplicity turned upside down.
I was visiting a physicist in his office tower jutting from his Illinois farmlands. We looked through his window at the laboratory’s miles—around particle accelerator, an immense circle in the prairie far below. “It’s a kind of time machine,” he said, explaining that the accelerator enables physicists to study conditions like those shortly after Creation’s first moment. The universe was simpler then, he noted, a mere dot comprising perhaps only one kind of force and one kind of particle. Now it has many kinds of forces, scores of different particles, and contains everything from stars and galaxies to dandelions, elephants and the poems of Keats.
Complexity, I began to see from that tower, is part of God’s plan.
Deep down, we sense that we speak, disparagingly, of a “simpleton”. Nobody wants to be guilty of “simplistic” thinking.
But blinding ourselves to complexity can be dangerous. Once I bought a home. I liked its setting so much I unconsciously avoided probing into its possible defects. After it was mine, I found it needed insulation, roofing, a new heating system, new windows, a new septic system—everything. That old house became an albatross, costing far more than I could afford, the cost in stress was even higher, I had refused to look at the complexities.
Even ordinary finances are rarely simple—what does your insurance policy actually cover? Yet, economics are simplicity itself compared with moral questions.
One afternoon when I was ten, I found myself the leader of an after-school gaggle of boys. I had to divert them quickly, I knew, or my career as leader would be brief. And then I saw Joe.
Joe was an Eiffel Tower of a kid, an incipient giant. His family had emigrated from Europe, and he had a faint accent.
“Let’s get him!” I said.
My little troop of Goths swarmed upon Joe. Somebody snatched his hat and we played catch with it. Joe ran home, and I took his hat as a trophy.
That night, our doorbell rang. Joe’s father, a worried-looking farmer with a thick accent, asked for Joe’s hat. I returned it sheepishly. “Please don’t upset Joe,” he said earnestly. “He has asthma. When he has an attack, it is hard for him to get better.”
I felt a lead softball in my chest. The next evening I walked to Joe’s house. He was in the garden, tilling the soil, he watched me warily as I walked up. I asked if I could help. “Okay,” he said. After that I went often to help him and we became best friends.
I had taken a step toward adulthood. Inside myself I had seen possibilities, like a tangle of wires. This red wire was the possibility for evil, which requires no more than ignoring another’s pain. And here was the white wire of sympathy. I could have a hand in connecting all those wires—it was a matter of the decisions I made. I had discovered complexity, and found in it an opportunity to choose, to grow. Its price is responsibility.
