Nevermind Simplicity for the Sake of Relationships

While living in Santa Barbara, I had the pleasure of playing and worshiping with a number of great musicians.  The other day, my brother and I were able to reunite with a couple of these dear ones.  Thaddeus is local, and he's a jazz beast; he plays a number of instruments, and he writes a lot of his own music, including his own raps- he's a bonafide  lyrical wordsmith.  Matt just got back from living in Ecuador for a year and he is the beat master- the boy can make a single djembe sound like a polyrhythmic orchestra.

Matt talked about one of the things he learned while out in Ecuador: simplicity.  Going without many things that we would call basic needs- like food, beds, cell phones (you see where I'm getting at...)- he found that their absence magnified, quite counterintuitively, the human need for things that were not material, not visceral: instead, he realized that the human person mostly needs things like self-understanding, deep connections with other people and a relationship with God.

Matt found that as universally a principle as simplicity should be applied to one's own practices, there is one area in life that this may not be appropriate and that is in the realm of inter-personal relationships.  If it is for the sake of nurturing relationships with friends and families, in lieu of simplicity, we should act lavishly and we should indulge.  For example, if it means spending time and money on travel to visit a loved one, then it should almost be considered a necessary sacrifice- if it means buying gifts, if it means doing favors, if it means wading in the terrible pain of another, if it means going out of your way, then do it.

The point is, that there is a lot that clutters our lives- whether they be our  things or our dramas.  We could bare to start stripping our lives down, living more simply- practicing the simplicity of just being, for example.  I speak vaguely, but that's just to keep this short.  If I'm honest (and if you can't already tell), I probably haven't sat down and thought through the implications nor complications of such a philosophy but I do figure that at the end of the day, regardless of how much or how little we have, we will account for the quality of our relationships, the connections we make with other human beings and with God.