A simple life.
How do you measure your life? Do you determine the success of your day by the car in your driveway, the balance in your bank, or square footage you call home?
Do you find yourself unable to take joy in the simplest of pleasures, when silence heralds joy and where solitude begets serenity?
Too many times, I talk to people who feel their life is not a success because they have not achieved something ‘heroic, epic, or noteworthy’. These are they who can find no peace nor rest in their endeavors, for they are eternally lost in the incessant hunger for achievement and fame.
Somewhere, in all of our stories of conflict, love and endeavor, we have lost our perspective of the beauty and wonder of a life lived without fanfare, a time spent in the wonder of the everyday.
We have lost appreciation of ‘that which makes us happy’ in favor of ‘that which brings us attention’. In this world of social media, where the rush to be louder has drowned out the responsibility to be kinder, we see a distortion of the simple into the sensational, the calm into the chaotic, and the everyday into the extraordinary.
In our attempts to rise above so that we might be noticed, we have abandoned many of the simple day to day activities that can bring us joy. A quiet talk with a dear friend is interrupted by the constant cacophony of electronic media. An afternoon spent in the garden is overshadowed by the need to create a masterpiece to be viewed by others. A life lived with a single companion is judged against the constant never ending stream of new partners that bring neither peace nor contentment.
As we race headlong into the digital frontier, where reality is virtual and where the sensational is replacing the ordinary, we are sacrificing our humanity and our perspective for the temporary thrill, the abandonment of goodness and the ever expanding need to be ‘something’.
Today, I implore you to just be. You are enough. You are enough. You possess in you all the kindness and compassion you need to fill the world around you with love and light.
You do not need more. You do not need to be more.
You are, and that is all you need to be.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings