Live Simply

Life is a room that we live in. Our minds are occupied with the moments that we spend in that room. I look around me, at the complexity of what appears to be one’s life, and I realize that it could all be done a lot more simply with a lot less us in it and a lot more life in it. The Buddhist mindset seeks to eliminate the self. What we want to experience is life not self and when there’s less self and more life we’re very content. When there is more self and less life we’re quite unhappy. What prevents us from experiencing life itself is just a great deal of clutter. The clutter in our lives is the reflection of the clutter in our minds. The way you keep your life clean is by not letting a lot of clutter in. You keep it simple. The more complicated you make it, the less clean it is.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail… Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.