TIME IS FINITE

Time is fleeting. It is a limited resource of unknown quantity. No one knows how much time they will have, so it is important to live a purposeful, meaningful life starting now. Too often we miss that point. We think, oh, I'll start living the life the I want or dreamed of someday soon. But, just like Creedence Clearwater Revival says, "Someday never comes."

From the time we are young, we are given empty platitudes on how we live in a world of infinite opportunities and infinite possibilities. In elementary school we are taught that we can be anything we want:  a scientist, an astronaut, a fireman, etc. We are told to follow our passion, heart, dreams, desires. And then one day we wake up to realize that we are living unfulfilled lives or doing dull work. Not what we dreamed of. Magically, we did not become everything we wanted to be, and life did not turn out exactly as planned.

The advice that was given was poor advice, which only lead down dead-end streets of the self. Part of why the aforementioned advice is so bad is that it gets a person out of touch with both time and reality. Life may very well be swelling with an infinite number of possibilities, but there is only a finite amount of time each of us have on earth. If you connect those dots in your mind, automatically you realize that you can't be anything and everything you want. It is in fact an impossibility.

"LITTLE AND OFTEN MAKES MUCH"

A while ago I got a fortune cookie that offered up a sage piece of wisdom. Usually, the "wisdom" of those cookies is only about as good as the taste (pretty bland, or just outright bad). Good things may very well be on the horizon, or those may very well be the winning lotto numbers, but experience has shown me that a cookie cannot divine the future. Suffice it to say, I open each one with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, the cookie I received recently actually had an impact on me because it offered up a tangible, pragmatic piece of advice that I could actually use. It read:

"Little and often makes much."

Now, I had never seen this quote before. Probably its been written on countless motivational posters, or found itself in collections of pity quotes, but this was the first time I encountered it. Immediately, I could see the value and wisdom in it. I wanted to apply that philosophy to my life.

JUST GETTING STARTED

This blog is indeed in its infancy. Any kind of "Best Of" list would be a bit of false advertising, or at the very least a misnomer. But already an interesting conversation has been started. A conversation that revolves around the ideas of finding balance and simplicity in our daily lives in a hurried age.

A good starting point for those visiting this blog for the first time are the following posts that help to start the conversation on living simply and more purposefully, despite life's myriad distractions. They also strike at defining simplicity in our lives each day. The goal is not to come up with one recipe for the "simple" life, rather the blog is designed to give you the ingredients to shape your own life with simplicity in mind. It all goes into the soup of life. Each person's recipe is going to be a bit different, but will serve the same purpose.

• "Simple in Today's World"
• "Defining Simple in our Lives"
• "Avoiding Distracted Living" 

 I hope that folks visiting this blog for the first time will find joy and value in the message of simplicity herein. It is an important message, and it is a timely one. Please return often to see the conversation continue. A blog is only as interesting as the debate and discussion that revolves around it and the audience that contributes to it. I know that in time, a rich conversation will grow around the ideas here, especially in a time when many are desperately yearning for a simple message to be told.

HAPPINESS THROUGH CONTENTMENT

Happiness is a relatively easy term to define in the traditional, formal sense. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary offers up the "full definition" as:

"a : a state of well-being and contentment : joy
b : a pleasurable or satisfying experience"

This formal definition reaches quite simply for something that most of us have been searching for in some way our entire lives. We tend to see "happiness" as being something elusive. This idea is evidenced in the writings of the Founding Fathers, the architects of the Constitution, who believed that each individual is entitled to the "pursuit of happiness." That is not to say that each individual will achieve happiness, it just says that each is entitled to take part in that journey. Whether one will ever find happiness that is an entirely different question.