by Jeff Vidrine

Created on: May 17, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2009

A Return to Simplicity: Observations

The best advice comes from someone with personal experiences to share. So one should look to someone who has lived to learn about life. The adviser that comes to mind is a man who taught simple living as a means of stripping life bare, to simplify life's day to day details in order to appreciate the essence of life. The ancients knew life stripped bare, no artifice, nothing extra. The Greeks, for example, had no computer and yet Pythagoras made his theorems. The Romans built roads, aqueducts, and had indoor plumbing without "texting" anyone. Vikings plowed through the seas navigating by the stars sans GPS units, much less a map.

Each era and culture has its group that calls the rest of society back to the basics. The ancient Greek Stoics lived simply, in an attempt to boil down life to its essence. In the Old Testament, the "back to basics" crowd were called Prophets. In mid to late 19th century America, with the turmoil of the Civil War, abolition of slavery and the industrial revolution, society was in a cultural upheaval. Life was becoming more and more complex. From this milieu developed movements like Transcendentalism and the Shakers.

Henry David Thoreau epitomizes the simplicity concept. As an experiment, he spent almost two years living in a cabin he built himself near Concord, Massachusetts. He documented his experiment in Walden.

Quotes from his writings are a guide for us today. One oft-quoted passage is:

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." HDT

Of what are the mass of men despairing? Why are they quiet? I propose that they despair of wasting their time on earth by over-complicating their lives through attachment to things and to their jobs necessary to maintain that standard of living. And that is their secret. It is why they are quiet. Shhh-we don't want the neighbors to know.

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." HDT

Boiled down to its essence, this passage is the theme of Walden. Thoreau calls us to use a different type of scale, a new system of weights and measures to determine our priorities. Temporal life, with its finite endpoints of birth and death, is the highest form of currency. Life is the gold standard in Thoreau's system. He would posit the question: Is working two jobs or in a vocation that you loathe worth that new car note, bathroom remodel or the mortgage on the big house you can't really

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