I really want life to be simple you know, but for some reason it just keeps getting more and more complicated. Take this blog, for example. I want it to be a picture of what’s happening in my life - the simple record of what I think and how I’ve chosen to express it. But it can’t be that, not really, because there are layers of emotions, opinions, events, and other people involved. And it’s not fair to write about those things. So, I have to be cryptic if I want to achieve my ‘simple’ goal. And being cryptic is the art of deliberately making things more complicated.
That’s just an example. Trying to make sure Sammy has the best birthday next month is another. That ought to be simple; it’s turning out to be more like a strategy puzzle, almost a board game of clever thinking, given the number of people involved. Plus, unfortunately, I’m just not very good at that kind of thing.
There are more examples. But you get the picture: people are complex, so life is complicated, and simplicity is therefore hard. Consequently I feel like my brain is silting up with all the complexity, stagnating into a sort of inactivity - which truly terrifies me. Even explaining it seems to over-solidify the mess into even more complicated tangles.
That’s why, on the 7am zoom prayer meeting this morning, I asked Mick to pray for freshness for me. “New year, new routines,” I said, “I just need a fresh wind blowing.”
“I think we could all do with a bit of that,” he said in return. They prayed. I drifted off to Stornoway, where I had sat on the clifftop watching the waves crash into the rocks below. That was a fresh wind. The Isle of Lewis once had a ‘revival’ there, and it had occurred to me in that deafening wind that to ‘re-vive’ something, it had to be dead, then given new life. That felt simple. It still does, provided I’m okay letting go of the silted complexity.
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