A while back I put out a quote from my mother, Juanita Rush, who came up it while in an Alzheimer’s ward. She said, “When we were younger, the things we thought were hard were really pretty easy.”
Recently I have been doing some work on the web presence of my blog and I came across this quote I had posted attributed to Confucius which states: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.“
It dawned on me my mother was channeling Confucius. I am not very sure how channeling Confucius would have fit into my mother’s Christian world view, but wisdom, like love is where you find it.
I am not sure I totally agree with Confucius, as I frequently can be heard saying, well muttering, “Life is hard.” But as a whole, we humans do have a tendency to over complicate things.
I suppose there are a few ways to look at those statements. One is the KISS rule ( Keep It Simple Stupid/Silly) which was my motto when I was programming. When the code started to get overly convoluted it was a sure bet I did not understand the requirements sufficiently well to write simple code. I went back to square one in most cases.
The other is perhaps almost violating the KISS rule a bit. Once we get past the basic needs of food and shelter what seems to matter most in our lives are relationships and purpose. And perchance, purpose, for many of us if not most of us, is just a recursion of relationship . Perhaps it boils down to a couple quotes from one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut.
“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
“I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, “Please– a little less love, and a little more common decency.'”
Vonnegut is really just restating the Golden Rule in his own wonderful way. Imagine what this world would be if we really did KISS and followed Vonnegut’s one rule, and were kind to each other.
You write so well. Thanks for a look back at your momma. Sometimes our words can change our lives and others lives in ways that manifest in many ways. The best ways are through kindness, judgeless understanding and love.
You rock David.