Simplistic versus Simplicity

Ignorance v Awareness

Inattention v Knowledge

Laziness v Spirit of Helping

Deception v Honesty, Sincerity

Easy for Us v Easy for Them

I found this contrast online simply googling the word “simplicity.” It popped up in the “images” section. I traced it back to “presentationzen.com”. It is perfect.

I have always sought simplicity, and then rebelled against the simplistic viewpoints I have encountered. Pretending climate change is a hoax is not simplicity. It is ignorance of the mind-bogglingly complex interconnections of the real world. It reminds me of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” debacle of the 1980s. Simplistic attitudes address nothing.

Of course, I found this nugget of perfection on a Zen website. Zen is real. Zen is in-your-face. Zen confronts you with who you are, not the pretty images we all try to project.

The most telling contrast is “Easy for us versus Easy for them.” Ask any programmer and they will tell you that the most complex thing in the world for them is to make a product “intuitive” and user-friendly. Like “the natural look” in makeup, a lot of work goes into its appearance of easy flawlessness. To make something look simple and Zen requires a great deal of up-front thought, planning, and preparation.

Anyone can take something simple and make it look complicated. It takes a genius to make something complicated appear simple. I had an anthropology professor like that. Sitting in his classes made the material seem strikingly obvious and left you feeling like, “Why do the other instructors make all this easy stuff look so hard?” Arthur Helweg (of Western Michigan University) is a genius. That’s all. In my opinion, he is on the level of Steve Jobs.

Leave it to our corporate, consumeristic culture to co-opt, bastardize, and taint the beauty of simplicity. Entire magazines are published to help people look simple and eco-friendly. The people in their articles wear $500 pairs of shoes as they tout the advantages of “simplicity.” It is difficult to imagine them missing the point to any greater extent. Meanwhile, McMindfulness overruns corporate America, encouraging workers to pay closer attention to their jobs. If they are not careful, these workers will start seeing through the meaninglessness of their jobs and start finding ways of making their lives genuinely simple.

I guess the reason the image of the contrasts struck me so hard was my attempt to live more simply and how demanding and relentless simplicity, harmony, and Zen truly are. Talking about them are easy, while doing them is something else. Making time for Zen is challenging. Staying on top of demands is never-ending.

I realized a week or so ago that part of my desire to “live more simply” is nothing more complicated than a yearning to be free of my current responsibilities. There is a limit to how simple my life can become while taking care of a sick husband. Also, the weather has made me want to hibernate until spring. The Weather Channel showed a map of the world’s temperature deviations from normal. The Eastern U.S. and Greenland were blue, indicating cooler than normal temps, and the rest of the world was various shades of red and orange, revealing the truth of global warming. In Michigan, many of us don’t even want to open our front doors because it is so bitterly cold. Nodding off is so easy—and tough to justify in a world gone haywire. “Keeping things simple” may be more fantasy than reality at this point in my life.  I reject both needless complexity and stupid simplisticness. Funny how it doesn’t feel like I am trying to strike a balance. Or be inordinately contrary. But it sure looks that way.