“Well, most times we kind of ignore the most obvious things about life. One of life’s ironies.”
Any chance I get, I will always try to ask for advice and guidance from those I look up to and inspired by. There is so much to learn about life from the elder’s life experiences.
What strikes me is that most of the advice and wisdom I get mostly seem too simple to be true. You’d think them telling you something as simple as a smile having the power to open many doors is bogus and something reserved for a kindergarten class.
No matter how much simplicity is preached and taught, we still find a way to over-complicate life. It’s maybe one of our greatest skills and talents. Every now and then people will scuff at the youth about how reckless and senseless they are, being wasted on being young and so forth.
The irony is that the more we do and get, the more we want, which leads us to do quite some bizarre things we wouldn’t usually do. It’s a slippery slope, because on the other side a young person will be criticised and castrated for not doing anything and will be pressured to do something, anything, the bigger and more complex, the better.
We work hard over the years to accumulate a lot of assets, money, to build up a network of relationships and even to guard a reputation. Only for us to get all we ever wanted and end up being suffocated by our achievements. The more you get the more you want.
Something I learned and constantly comes up from those that are a few decades older and are seasoned humans in the art of living and surviving on earth is that in the long run, getting all the material things one wishes for doesn’t satisfy the soul, but they never tell you this or explain it to those on the come up, simplicity must be difficult to teach to the youth.
They end up being suffocated by them and then inertly end up spending their twilight years trying to shed themselves of those materials.
Leonardo da Vinci could not have said it better when he said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Sophistication is too complex to be understood and simplicity is to sophisticated to be effortless.
Simplicity is king, it should be the most obvious thing about life.