by John Barden

Created on: January 25, 2009   Last Updated: May 04, 2010

"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need." Vernon Howard

When my Mom passed away 10 years ago, a heart breaking responsibility fell on my shoulders: I had to sort through all her worldly possessions and decide what to keep and cherish, what to divide among friends and family, what to donate to charity, and what to simply throw away. Anyone would find this difficult, but for one with an artist's sensibilities, the anguish was acute. I have yet to complete my sorrowful obligation.

Still, through this painful process of letting go, I came to notice how many needless things we humans, all of us, unconsciously accumulate during the blessed journey of our sacred lives, and began to examine my own odd habits of clutching on to possessions that seem to possess me, hold me down, and overburden the gravitational stresses of my already cluttered world. It was then that I resolved to divest myself of everything I owned but didn't use or need. The goal I set myself was clear: when I died, anyone charged with cleaning up after me could simply scoop out the contents of a single closet and be done.

I think that's what Thoreau was after in his pursuit of simplicity - not that we shouldn't own things that were useful and enhanced our lives, but that we didn't need things that did not.

He lived his relatively short life during the early to mid 19th century, a simpler time than ours. Yet he felt a compelling desire to pare down his life to the basic elements of universal human need. He understood, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that appetite grows by what it feeds on - the want for more and more and more.

He built a cabin in the woods, on the land of a mentor and a friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He lived close enough to civilization and all its comforts, but just far enough away for him to think on things more deeply.

Predictably, in his time he had his critics. Some even mocked his approach to life as effeminate - like Arnold Schwarzenegger calling his opponents 'girly men' today. Yet shouldn't we all, at one time or another, crawl out of the bloody ring of fiercely competitive world pressures, and retire to a place of solitude and peace to find ourselves? What's wrong with that? As Socrates so rightly observed, an unexamined life is not worth living.

There were some who recognized his work as genius. The 'less is more' crowd. They believed that being free of material possessions is an emancipation that allows one ultimately to be in possession of their souls, not bound to worldly things that are essentially inconsequential.

Still, there will always be those of us who believe that more is not enough - the Donald Trumps of the world, who consider their own offspring as nothing more than a 'brand extension', a way of expanding their need for greed across the world. Such people will always populate our time on earth.

So will our prophets. Leonardo Da Vinci - himself caught up in the whirl of the world at war and the pressure to be productive - once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

So I leave you with a few salient quotations that I take close to heart and treasure:

"When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." Lao Tzu

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Henry David Thoreau

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." Hans Hofmann

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