Simplicity

I believe in not filling your life with unnecessary things. Strip your life down to what you need, what is healthy for you, and not just what you want to acquire or do because you’re bored.

Thoreau said that “When 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.”

The society in which we live is full of distractions. We are led by consumerism and the need to be entertained. Every day we are bombarded with advertisements telling us the next thing we need to buy in order to be cool. Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, iPods: All great things, but always with us all of the time. We are never truly alone and its usually because we don’t want to be.

If you are never alone, how do you know who you are when separated from all of the materials that surround you? This isn’t to say that you should go be a hermit and live in the woods, but solitude is not a bad thing. Strip yourself of distraction and the expectations of the world and sit down to think and feel.

The world is not a simple place, which is why it’s so important to break it down into simple things. Who are you underneath the designer clothes? Who are you when you are sitting in silence?

I grew up in a house where my mother taught my brother and me until sixth grade. We bordered on the side of the weird homeschoolers, our friends were some of the people who got rid of their microwaves because it “cooked the nutrients out of the food.” My brother is seven years older, so a lot of my time was spent alone. When I was seven, my parents decided to get rid of our TV. It was one of the best things I think they did for us. Instead of sitting on a couch staring at a screen all afternoon, I was playing outside. My dad and I used to go on hikes when he would get home from work, and as a result, I still love the outdoors. I love the purity and silence of it.

My parents raised us in a way that was relatively simple. They wanted us to be aware of the world around us and to be aware of ourselves. I love them for it.

Life is really short. Fill it with meaning, not with things that are going to fade away and disintegrate just to be replaced with something equally temporary. There is a lot of beauty in the world, but sometimes you need to be still in order to see it.