Sunday, May 13th, 2012

Simplicity/Clarity

 

New Vrndavan, West Virginia

 

I've got the same routing today, a clockwise trekking around the pond for as close to a two hour stretch as possible. This also registers as sixteen rounds of chanting the maha mantra. Being single, life is relatively simple. You walk carefreely around a pond. What more can you want?

 

I like what one of the presenters at "The Festival of Inspiration" said, "Simplicity breeds clarity." And from whom he was quoting, well, I missed that point and couldn't write everything down fast enough. Yet the remark is profound. It has been my experience that the more you bog yourself down with things, the more complicated is your lifestyle, and the more anguish, stress and illness you will feel. This is what I see goes on in people's lives while I've had the fortune to not have much but always enough.

 

I consider the situation one of true richness. It's not "how much you have but how much you need".

 

With our journey through West Virginia, Pennsylvania and then New York state we drove through some splendid landscape and for a washroom snack break stopped in for a refuel at one spot. I chose a drink to get some liquid in and it cost me 99 cents. I was surprised, "So cheap!" So, it dawned on me that food is so easy to come by in the States. Perhaps that accounts for the great problem of obesity in America. Things are so easy to come by in North America, in general, and yet somehow the simplicity factor is so much amiss. We live in a barrage of things. With 'more shopping malls in America than schools' as one presenter put it, it's no wonder there is little peace, there's tons of confusion and little clarity in the lives of us today.

 

6 Km