Episode 51: Tis a Gift to be Simple

[00:00:00] What in life deserves our time and attention? And what things don't? I hope that as we consider that question, along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - "Tis a Gift to be Simple."

I love the old Shaker song, Simple [00:00:30] Gifts. I don't entirely know why the idea of being simple resonates so much, but I thought it might be an idea worth exploring. Maybe it's a gift to be simple. Because if you can be satisfied while living simply, then you've found contentment. Speaking as a person that feels they have a complicated life, the very idea sounds like relief from the hustle and bustle of the day.

To have contentment and to have peace truly and deeply is a [00:01:00] gift. We relentlessly pursue so many things in life. More money, more stuff, more excursions, more friends, more novelty, more knowledge. And life also relentlessly pursues us, as other people begin to depend on us, and sometimes life gets messy. I think to some degree, most people are in a perpetual state of striving for the next dream.

And gone are the days when our parents were farmers, and our grandparents were [00:01:30] farmers, and we were farmers. Gone are the days when the highlight of the year was some party in town or a visit from family. And gone are the days when we were told to not aspire for more than we were born with in life. Also, times when your entire family might have lived in the same neighborhood are hardly more than a quaint story at this point.

The days of simplicity have drifted away. As we've gained more and more abundance. [00:02:00] Today we can stream virtually anything that we can think to watch whenever we want to watch it. We can easily move to some other place for relatively little cost if we choose to. The average person can now travel to the other side of the world.

and be back again the following week. If we don't like the people around us, we can find our way into a community of people that think exactly like us from all over the world by getting on the internet. We don't even have to [00:02:30] go to the grocery store if we don't want to. Today, we don't need to rely on others in our community to get by.

We don't have to limit ourselves to friends in our local neighborhoods. In fact, we can even live in a community and never even have to talk to anyone in it. With the exponential growth of options in our lives, we have grown further and further apart, and our lives are anything but simple. In place of simplicity, it seems we have been [00:03:00] gifted abundance, which in turn seems to have unleashed a voracious monster in us that can't be satisfied.

It is as if we have collectively decided that some kind of peace and contentment awaits us if we can just reach some goal. or acquire something. I find myself contemplating on occasion what thing in life is going to finally give me satisfaction. When I was younger, I remember that [00:03:30] in my mind, if I could just find the right girl, then I would be happy.

When I got a little older, If I could just make over a certain amount of money, then I could be happy. And from day to day now, I spend time imagining what tool or other item is going to benefit me all the while struggling to take those quiet moments to just be content and not need anything for once. I find that in those quiet moments, I sometimes allow [00:04:00] myself to sit.

The constant striving for the next thing, the next promotion, the next success, the next relationship is exhausting. It's mostly pain until we reach that next step. And then briefly we have a moment of happiness until our new acquisition loses its novelty and you go back to looking for the next thing. I wonder sometimes [00:04:30] if there's something inherently good about our striving natures.

If so, it's clear that our nature has largely been turned against us. Even though I stand in awe of the advancements made by humankind, I wonder if in our day to day lives we are any happier than our ancestors that lived through much more unforgiving and harsh circumstances. I mentioned that shaker song, Simple Gifts.

I want to share the original lyrics with you. And if I were [00:05:00] braver, I would just sing it for you. But I'm not. But it goes as follows. Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free, tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, t'will be in the valley of love and delight, when true simplicity is gained.

To bow and to bend, we shan't be ashamed. To turn, turn, turn. So [00:05:30] turning is a reference to dancing, and coming round right refers to coming back to where you started at the beginning of the dance. And there's something almost more poetic to the dance reference in this song than even the beauty of the first part of it.

To turn, turn, will be our delight, till by turning, turning, We come round right. [00:06:00] It's really quite hard to remember that life can be a dance, because we have so frequently chosen to make ourselves unhappy. With our overabundance of desires. You may not be the kind of person that enjoys dancing, but I'm sure you can relate to what a dancer experiences.

It is a moment of pure pleasure, without a thought about the future or the past. It is a moment of release from the burden of our desires, because in that [00:06:30] moment we are being fulfilled, and enjoying the now. There are a few alternate verses I found that were not part of the original song, but are nearly as beautiful, so I'm going to share those as well.

'Tis the gift to have friends, and a true friend to be. 'Tis the gift to think of others, not to only think of me. And when we hear what others really think and really feel, then we'll all live together with a love that is real. [00:07:00] 'Tis the gift to be loving. 'Tis the best gift of all.

There are so many voices in the world telling us how to live and how to be, and more than a few of them are encouraging us to reach for the stars, to conquer new heights, to attain the next greatest thing, and to break through the limitations the world [00:07:30] has set for us. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo famously states, I defy you stars. And like Romeo, we all too often choose to rant, and to rave, and to shout, as we try to defy the stars, when all the while, we should have been enjoying the incredible opportunity of witnessing them in the first place. Tis a gift to be simple. It's a gift to be free.[00:08:00] 

This is Skipping Stones. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly, every [00:08:30] Monday.