Self-help authors make millions of dollars by making us believe that life is extremely complex and entirely out of our control. They do this of course, because they want us to feel helpless – they do that, of course, because – lucky for us- they’ve got the answer we need. The math is simple really, if we don’t have an answer (and we’re powerless in our pursuit of it) and they do – we will purchase things from them. Or at least that’s how they’ve designed it. There’s big money in commercial confusion.
The truth is, life really isn’t complicated. It isn’t, no matter what our churches and parents and teachers might have us believe – it isn’t. The truth is that it’s actually easier to believe that life is complicated than it is to accept and surrender to the fact that life is actually pretty simple.
To believe that the reality we engage daily is a complicated one, mastered only by geniuses and the lucky is actually easier to accept than the responsibility of self-direction. If we throw our hands in the air and constantly lament the complexities of life and our forever inability to conquer that, the ownership then isn’t on us. We can blame our insufficiencies on a system built against us, entirely out of our control (Damn you, Eve).
And we buy it. I buy it. Almost every single day, I do. In some form, I raise a white flag of resignation, labeling life as too difficult to learn, that I’m ill-equipped and damned to failure (or worse, mediocrity). I’s a pernicious lie, but it’s a lie no less.
Because the truth is that life is simple.
Life really is simple, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we find healing, the sooner we find freedom.
So, we’re born into a fallen world. We have a few things, we want a few things – but mostly we want peace. That’s about it. That’s right, I have effectively summed up the trials, tribulations and long, cold complexity of life in a single (albeit trite and potentially insensitive) proclamation.
We have a few things, we want a few things – mostly we want peace. The reason it probably sounds preposterous is because of the layers and layers of psychological justification we’ve added to a pretty simple truth. The further down we can distill the tangled messes of our lives, the better look we can have at the things that truly call to us. the passion that pursues us, the distant idea of a Life that – no matter what – we can’t seem to shake off.
We want passion.
We want a purpose.
We want peace.
Any other ambition is either a perversion of these indwelling desires or else a gross manifestation of their suppression. Passion misdirected masquerades as lust. Purpose without passion becomes an insatiable search for identity.
And peace…
Peace is probably the most commonly perverted. Really, peace is the underpinning of every kind of ambition.
Peace is the safe harbor at the end of the crossing. And most of us spend our time dreaming of lighthouses while settling for the unanchored lights of other ships also lost at sea.
So we want peace, but we settle for leveraged loans and brand new clothes with the hopeless idea that “enough” actually exists in some nebulous, stratospheric reality that seems to be always just above our reach. But what we’re really looking for is contentment. Contentment in who we are, what we believe, where we live, who we marry, what we look like, what we drive. But what we’re really looking for is peace.
Despite what we’d have you think, It’s not unbridled ambition that chains men to their desks, trading their family for work – it’s the misunderstanding that peace comes with getting more. In almost every example I can dream of, peace comes with having less.
I don’t believe that life comes at the end of some correctly-answered algorithm. I believe that maybe Life comes to us simply, purely and easily, if we’re willing to let go of the crutches of complexity. Maybe, if we’re willing to let go completely, we’ll find that Life had actually been pursuing us all along.
