Keep it simple

By Becky Nelson
Bramblings
It’s early morning as I write this week. I am sitting in a chair newly repositioned so I can glance out the window over a couple of farm fields and a clump of lilac bushes where the bird feeders are set. I ignored wildlife experts advice about bears and continued to fill my feeders this year, and the results have been amazing. I figure that the birds need food just as much as the bruins do, and I was willing to take the chance and attract my feathered friends to a meal. Cardinals are still coming, a few chickadees flit in and out on occasion, bluejays frequent the feeder, and I had the most delightful surprise of a lone indigo bunting the last few days. A reader of the column emailed me to tell me she had three indigo buntings at her feeder recently as they flew through to their summer destination.

It is raining this morning. The sound on the roof of my screen room reminds me of rain on the tin roof of the barn when I was a kid. It was a simple pleasure to relax in the hay while the rain drummed and sang. Dad taught me to enjoy many simple pleasures … night sounds, lilacs, the sound of a partridge drumming, thunderstorms, the shape of leaves, the taste of wild edibles, the beauty of poetry and rhymes, the appreciation of a good joke, the loving of the moment.

Keeping it simple is the most complex of ideas, it seems. We bustle and rush and ignore what is good and simple and most necessary in making our lives meaningful. We are so plugged in and so reliant on complexity in our lives that we sometimes, often, lose sight of the meaningful and the beauty.

We have some pretty complex machinery that we rely on here at the farm. When it breaks down, too often it takes a really long time to figure out a fix. One recent breakdown has us all a bit frustrated. The more expensive and comfortable-to-ride of the lawn mowers has conked out. It eats through the belts that run the blades, so we tried to make some adjustments to improve the condition. We ended up making it worse, as now the belt will not stay on at all and we will have to carve a couple of hours out of our day to take it to a repair shop. The most frustrating part is the belt itself. Unlike the simple arrangements that run the less expensive tractor, where a single belt moves a single blade, this tractor has a single belt that loops and winds around a multitude of pulleys in a twisted, convoluted mess that is hard to maneuver when needed. Why not just keep it simple? We have learned the hard way what type of lawn tractor not to buy, simply because it is not simple.

Keeping it simple is something we humans just don’t seem to treasure until we have a problem. My bluejay friend has found the feeder, and I am watching him or her enjoying an early morning breakfast. The birds have it right. They follow the rhythms of the seasons and do what they need to do to survive and procreate and, I hope, enjoy their way in life. They get complex only when it is time to build a nest or avoid a predator. In the background as I enjoy watching the bird, the sound of trucks traveling the highway just a quarter mile away reminds me that my life is pretty darn complex and duty calls.

My moment to enjoy the moment is fading, and the simple things will soon be lost as I get wrapped up in the daily struggle to schedule employees, schedule farm work, make appointments, plant, weed and nurture our growing products, keep track of the health of our animals, and make enough money to pay the bills. The concepts are simple, but there is nothing simple about the process of getting things done and satisfying and attracting customers to the products we grow. We make our lives complex without needing to do so, I am thinking. We strive to acquire the newest gadget, live under rules and laws and regulations that are hard to keep track of, mess around with interpersonal relationships until they are unworkable or unbearable, stress over deadlines and projects and appearances, abandon simple codes of conduct, push our kids to excel and advance and be at the top of their games without teaching them the joy and necessity of the simple things. We create our own chaos in many instances. We lose focus and can’t tell you our own life’s purpose on most days. However, I will try to take these couple of moments every day to enjoy the simple things and “refocus” as they say.

The bluejay is still there. He is choosing between types of seed in a bank of four feeders. If only our lives were so simple …