27 February 2016

Simple

@andrewburchfield.com
Simple

I've been pondering that word, its meaning and its ramifications, quite a bit of late. It's not as if the world in which I live is highly complex and fraught with significant difficulty. It really isn't but there are times when I like to think that it is. I don't think I'm alone in that notion. I think we can all pinpoint times in our lives when we have made things more challenging for ourselves than they need to be. For example:

Losing sleep over whether or not my upgrade on my London flight will clear.
Getting increasingly bothered about this being my 50th year of life.
Letting excuses (laziness, people, laziness) prevent me from doing right by my middle-aged body.
Being highly irritated by the fact that Matt LeBlanc will be one of the new hosts of "Top Gear"
The specter of a Trump presidency literally has my stomach in convulsive knots #NeverTrump

My list is not exhaustive and may be a little trivial (except for that horrifying Trump bit) but it typifies what I think we do to ourselves far too often. We've forgotten to keep things simple.

The great American philosopher Ronald Ulysses Swanson weighed in on this in his own inimitable way when he said:

"Live your life how you want,
but don't confuse drama with happiness."

Amen, Ron, amen.

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