Day 92

I used to work for the National Council on Alcoholism. I had a co-worker and friend named Pat who was "in recovery." It was the 1980s when those words had a particular meaning. Pat was older and wiser than me, often repeating colloquialisms common in the church basement circles she frequented. In response to my never ending quest for truth, Pat would sometimes say: "The truth is simple." I never asked what she meant because it seemed to go against the principle of the thing she was saying. But I tucked her wisdom away and sometimes when the words swirled in my head and my tendency toward analysis left me feeling like I was spinning in circles it would come back to me: the truth is simple. Later, as a graduate student, my teachers tried to convince me that the truth is quite complicated. They used words to obscure the truth: words that only an elite few have access to. I would read Habermas and Foucault convinced that there was a pearl of wisdom deep beneath the surface of the words. Why did they insist on hiding it under the silt and sand? The writers I admire most today are those who use words sparsely. I love finding a simple truth on the page: naked and real, accessible and unadorned. This morning I was reading a book by Sylvia Boorstein appropriately titled It's Easier Than You Think. On page 4, she defines mindfulness as: "the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience." This practice, she says, allows one to "manage gracefully." It doesn't get much more simple than that.