Simplification

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

After reading an earlier entry, Jen told me about an index card one of her friends had taped in her kitchen:

Simplify, simplify!

But after one of her parents' friends was through with it, it read:

Simplify, simplify!

Which recalls the question raised by one of the instructors at the Wake Forest AP Institute a few years ago: if Thoreau really meant it, wouldn't he have just written it once?

Of course, this is clever, but I fear that it misses the point Thoreau's making here. The simplification Thoreau is talking about is a radical one. He writes, "let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand."

The analogy that comes to mind here is cleaning out the closet. The first time you go through, you'll get rid of the stuff that's easy to get rid of, clothes you haven't worn in a long time and, to be honest, are awful. This isn't real simplification--it's just getting rid of crap. But if you force yourself to go through that closet a second time (and perhaps a third and a fourth), you'll be forced to make the difficult decisions, the ones that are more akin to what Thoreau wants us to make in our lives.

It's easy to get rid of the things we don't anyway. It would be easy for me to forswear thousand island salad dressing, for instance, since I don't really like it and never eat it. Or cable television, since I don't really watch it. Or lima beans. Or that sweater that my grandmother gave me for Christmas. But Thoreau is suggesting that we cull from our lives not just the things we don't like, but also many of the things we enjoy. And although this act might be painful, the benefit is that we will discover the things that are truly important to us and that, having gone through the (perhaps painful) process of simplifying our lives, our lives will become more focused on the few things that matter most to us.