SIMPLICITY AND THE FOG

Well I got some sleep and woke up with a jolt, on what appeared to be a very foggy November morning.

And it certainly was: the station, the road, the tarmac and the cars were all hidden by a thick swirling blanket of mist.

A Ferrari roared past me and swerved into a car park. A guy of about my age got out and tucked his sunglasses into his t-shirt.

It made me think, that did, as I wrapped my fingerless gloves inside my jacket pockets and strode into the chilly fog...

Why does he need sunglasses?

I'm feeling a bit better today. I'm certainly a bit more balanced. I think I'm learning to love simplicity.

In a way, fog simplifies everything - it removes the detail, the complexities of things you don't really need to be worried about. For a little while, we're all short-sighted in the fog, as though we've somehow gotten lost inside an impressionist painting.

For most of my life I've been a bit of a details-nerd. I peer into the fractal, dive straight into the intricate twists and turns and find exquisite and exotic beauty in the way things are constructed.

That's why when I was young, I'd start drawing details before sketching out where everything was going to go.

Fog doesn't let you do that. It clouds out the detail, it levels everything, reducing it all to wavering shapes hidden in the mist. There is a lot of beauty in a simpler world.

And I think I'm starting to recognise that about life too. I certainly want to; I want to simplify the way I think about everything - starting with the bigger picture, seeing what's going on before letting myself get annoyed by the microscopic differences I'm naturally drawn to.

As exquisite as they are, those subtle nuances are part of something much grander and simpler sometimes - and it's that world that I want to see, that I want to belong to.

In a way, that's where my quest to listen better is taking me too. I'm finding that when my ears are open, I'm not hearing just the grammatical dips and curls that people use without realising, but also, something much more obvious that those things are illuminating.

The detail is still there, it's just that all of it is painting a much fuller picture.

I scrunched over the yellow leaves by the Pepsico building and walked through the frosty looking park, carefully avoiding the geese by the lake. The office came looming into view through the fog.

I hope today is a simple one, I said to myself.