Simple Gifts – Sunday, September 08, 1985
The world is not so complicated as many people believe. Yes complication is easy to find, All one has to do is look at our cities, our technologies, our sciences, even our arts; and what one finds is so complex that a specialized education is required to understand it.
But understanding the detail and mechanics of modern living is not the same as understanding life, and that same complexity which helps us keep our sad world turning may be the very thing that keeps us from knowing life, from enjoying the simple gifts our world offers us.
Henry David Thoreau, who in the 19th century retreated to Walden Pond to discover life and to live it more fully, said that our primary objective in this world should be to “Simplify! Simplify!”1 Living true to that advice himself, he took pleasure in watching the sunrise, in studying the activities of ants, in marveling at the miracle of a sparrow, in hoeing a garden, in walking ten miles through the snow to see a “beech tree, or a yellow birch.”2
Of course, Thoreau didn’t have any freeways to fight or appointments to keep. He had no appliances to keep running or computers to keep programmed. Thoreau’s attention was not cluttered with so many “conveniences” as is our attention; he did not have so many frivolous responsibilities. Which is why he had more time and paid more attention to the fundamental world he discovered at Walden Pond. Which is why he was able to discover that simpler world, and why many people today cannot. The simple life—the life of simplicity and truth—is not simple to achieve. Our lives are so easily complicated—we are so easily distracted from bird song and the wonder of the sun coming up—that fundamental living and a simple life too frequently elude us.
The result is that many people are sucked down by the vortex of a rapidly turning, rapidly changing, forever self-complicating world. And, in the rush of places to go and things to do… people lose the gift of life itself.
“Tis the gift to be simple,” the old Shaker hymn observes, “Tis the gift to be free.”3 And, at no time has the gift been more valuable than today, because sometimes life is not so complex as we make it. Sometimes, the answer to the trouble in our world is no more complicated than the singing of the birds, and the rising of the sun, and the simple hope we find in life itself.
1 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
2 Ibid., “Winter Visitors”
3 Traditional Shaker Hymn, “Simple Gifts”
September 08, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,925