Tag: simplicity
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The Essential Complexity of Life
I spend most of my professional effort these days working on and thinking about software and computer programming. I enjoy it, and it casts a whole interesting lens on lots of other things. One topic I recently discovered — I even wrote about it in the software context — is the difference between essential (or inherent) complexity,…
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“Simple But Not Easy”
I don’t remember quite where I first encountered the phrase “simple but not easy,” but after a recent encounter it’s been stuck in my head. I believe deeply that all the important insights in life are simple. Really really really stupidly simple. The reason the phrase is stuck in my head, though, is that there’s an often…
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Simply Here. Simply Now.
We make life so complicated. We’re always ready to tell — to ourself or to others — our horror story. You know the one: where you explain why things aren’t as you really want them to be. Maybe you’re not rich yet, but need to be to be happy. Maybe you’ve been so slighted by the…
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On the Banality of Profound Truths
If there was one obstacle, beyond laziness, that made me hesitate to get back to writing in more than the few-sentence bursts I regularly produce for Link Banana it was my uncertainty about what of value I could say. It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know–while…
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In Praise of Simplicity
I think that one of greatest poems ever written is “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. You’d be hard pressed to find something that said so much with so little: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. The image is stark and clear, and though…