Until There Is No Simplicity To Seek

Lunch was a bowl of split-pea soup and an unsettled mind. Due to the change in seasons I’ve been sleeping later into the morning. My body is tuned to the rhythm of the setting and rising sun. With the sun rising later in the day during the fall and winter months I tend to go to sleep earlier and rise later. I try and cultivate what I see as that very natural sleeping pattern. Now, I am not sure that the change in sleeping patterns has anything to do with having an unsettled mind, but there may be a connection there somewhere.

When I am speaking of an unsettled mind, I mean a mind that does not want to settle on a single subject. It is different than a lack of focus. When I speak of a lack of focus, I mean the inability to focus clearly on the one thing that your mind has settled on. An unsettled mind may be a very focused mind, it just doesn’t want to spend too much time, or too much focus, on one thing. It moves from thing to thing, from thought to thought, through the day, as if it was searching for a specific thing or thought that it wanted to settle on. It is almost as if the mind is doing an inventory of its thoughts.

Currently, I am searching for some thought around the subject of simplicity. Externally, the last two years of my life have been a journey toward simplicity. The internal journey has mirrored the external journey. Somehow, in the preceding years, I had become incredibly cluttered in both my physical world and my psychological world. With each layer of complexity that gets peeled off, I see the underlying layer of simplicity. Then, in time, I come to see that as “not simple enough”, peel it back, and find another layer underneath. I am not sure if there is a bottom to the layers. If there is, I am not sure what lies underneath the last layer.

One of the parts of the journey that I have found particularly interesting has been this layered effect. You take the complexity of life, you take all of the component parts of that complexity, you contemplate them, try and understand which is which, what purpose they serve, what value they hold and it seems that in each successive iteration you find that any purpose or value is largely illusionary.

As you delve into things you discover the necessity of them and you discover that many of the things are simply not necessary. On my level, I am not sure you can put the horse before the cart. Let us say you have ten complex things in your life. I find that you have to spend a certain amount of time contemplating them, coming to understand them, before you can separate yourself from them.

That process of contemplation allows you to truly let them go. If you reverse that order, if you discard the complexity prior to understanding the complexity, then it is going to sneak back into your life. Your mind isn’t ready to let go of it yet. First comes understanding, then comes release.

This process of seeking simplicity continues until there is no simplicity to seek.