The Greatness and Difficulty of Simplicity
Food, music, and mental health
When I was young, my favorite pizza was the one with all the works. I looked forward to tasting every meat in the house, plus mushrooms, onions, olives, and green peppers, with lots of red sauce on a thick crust. Yum.
I still like what they called the “Supreme,” but years pass by and one grows wiser with a more sophisticated palate.
These days, my go-to, favorite menu item in the pizza world is what many restaurants term “the Greek.” Thin crust is better and allows one to taste more of the ingredients. Greek style has only feta cheese, spinach, and black olives. It is far less hardy than the Supreme, but my taste buds appreciate every bite more than being overwhelmed by meaty delights.
Becoming smarter often leads to a greater appreciation of simplicity. This is what happened to my pizza preferences and other things too.
I know, dear reader, you are on the edge of your seat listening to my food history, but I intend to discuss how great simplicity can be and how hard it is to achieve. Pizza is one example out of thousands that might be examined.
Sorry. I really am, but I just thought of another food example. You know how people on television like to concoct and show off burgers with the kitchen sink thrown in?
Hamburgers that include non-traditional ingredients and are stacked too high to eat make for interesting pictures. Once I dreamed of overloaded burgers and all the weird things I could put on them, but once again time and experiences have matured my tastes.
Now I know better. Ground beef that is high-quality has an unctuous flavor that should not be diluted with piles of superfluous stuff. One has to be able to recognize quality, however. Without this ability, I am sure lots of things to look at and chew on substitutes for the exceptional feeling of enjoying a perfectly composed burger.
Now let’s steer away from my food obsession.
No matter what we are talking about, simplicity is harder than complexity. Simple does not equate to easy or primitive, and I believe simplicity is usually the best option.
Something simple is often the purest form of any particular thing. It represents the “thing itself” as best we can imagine it was meant to be.
There is nothing to hide behind when an idea or material object is expressed without human contrivances that only muddy the waters. For many, simplicity is scary or too hard. This is because it is much easier to cover over one’s incompetence or laziness with a bunch of “bells and whistles” that distract from the artificiality of what someone has done.
What do people say when they cannot arrive at a direct answer? “It’s complicated” is the easy response. That actually means something like: “Go away, I do not feel like thinking.”
Most people over-complicate everyday situations and simple solutions to problems. I have noticed that human beings tend to underthink and overtalk. In addition to that, we are not too eager to take a position when offered an array of options, like when it is time to pick out the restaurant for the night. “What do you feel like eating?” turns into conversations or arguments with no end.
On a more serious note, simplicity has a role to play in our mental health. It has been said that human beings are complicated creatures, and that is true. Yet we can and should seek to reduce the clutter that causes anxiety and have a self-concept that is streamlined as much as possible.
In my life, I can say that I have thought about different careers and job titles. As a young lad picking a major, I considered Psychology, Art, Communications, English, and History. This can be very stressful as most of you probably know.
I eventually realized that I seek to share ideas, expand and enlighten minds, and use my creativity toward those ends. This is what I like to do in simplified form. I chose History because it is so wide-open to possibilities and, guess what, includes Art, English, Psychology, and literally every other subject.
Figuring this out fairly recently helped me to understand me. I edited who I am and what I wanted and found out more about my life’s purpose. In doing so, I simplified what I am supposed to do in this world. Now things make more sense.
Simplicity makes it more apparent what you should pursue and how you might get there and does not have any limiting effects. I think we have trouble with the word itself and misuse its meanings.
Simple is not simplistic. Yes, this is true in my strange brain. Whenever simplistic is heard it is a put-down of something judged as boring or of someone considered not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Seek to remove as much unneeded junk from your life as possible. If you have three blenders that do not work, bunches of old magazines you will never read, or whatever useless thing with missing parts, throw them away. Clear your living space and your mind will follow, thus becoming more focused and less scattered.
Any discussion of simplicity must include music and my favorite style: the Blues. You do not have to like the Blues or know anything about it to learn why this musical form is one of the world’s best expressions of art-as-stark-emotionality.
When I heard B.B. King, for example, and others for the first time, I sensed something different was happening. King’s work on the guitar is masterful and near-impossible to emulate, and it is because of simplicity.
Lots of folks like guitar heroes who play ultra-fast and use lots of tricks and equipment that changes the sound. That is okay, but not great. Actually, what seems hard to the untrained eye are the easiest things to do on the guitar.
King did not use any extras, such as guitar pedals, and he did not play super-fast or obnoxiously loud. You see, there are plenty of tools that seem impressive but lack soul. King’s music was about the thing itself and not representations of the thing; the sounds of anguish, loneliness, hope, and joy that he played is what all great art is about.
I know all this from years of practicing on the guitar and trying to capture the Blues sound. I learned that repetition cannot guarantee proficiency when it comes to emoting out those notes that I love. My hands know what to do and my eyes can see what to do, but King’s technique has no room for error or playing pretend.
Either you have it or you do not. And if one is off only a little, then the authenticity and greatness of the music is lost. You cannot recover it. That is why so many pretenders to the King’s throne dazzle us with everything but the thing itself.
Simply replace my favorite music and artists with yours. Everything I said applies (well, depending on your tastes of course).
Like with everything else one could argue, what I am saying here is true in the general sense but not in every case.
Overall, I think we will find happier days when simplicity is the goal. The wisest sages around the world have already declared all I am saying as correct. Learn to respect simplicity. Meditate on this awhile and began to notice what things in your life should be reduced to simpler terms.
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Seek to remove as much unneeded junk from your life as possible. If you have three blenders that do not work, bunches of old magazines you will never read, or whatever useless thing with missing parts, throw them away. Clear your living space and your mind will follow, thus becoming more focused and less scattered.
Brilliant… wish my wife would follow that advice….lol
The amount of relief I feel after doing a “clean-up” (often singing the clean-up song, of course) of my spaces is so immense, you’d think I’d avoid the piles to begin with… but I’m a pile-maker!
When it comes to food, I do love a good juxtaposition of flavors. But you are correct, something’s just go too far. Our community has an annual fundraiser where local restaurants create grilled cheese “masterpieces” and part of the proceeds go the local food bank. One year, a restaurant made a “taco mama” grilled cheese sandwich that had ground beef inside and crushed Doritos on the outside. It was too far. Way too far. It was no longer a grilled cheese sandwich. (And I’m a bit of a grilled cheese aficionado. Please don’t read that as “snob”— I’ve just had many versions!)