Simplifying

My no-frills living starts with basic belief. A priest accidentally led me to God. I was six, braving first confession, the mandatory Catholic rite of passage. Having hardly memorized,
much less understood, the ritual prayers, I mumbled and hoped the priest would not notice. But suddenly he stormed out of his sacred cubicle and bellowed, “Go home,” he was big and red, “Come back when you have memorized the prayers.”

I remember thinking why I had to memorize words to talk to God. And I wondered how saying the same words over and over again could erase my sins. But most of all I was so scared to go back to the man in the box.

Maybe I could talk to God directly? And so I did. I prayed at bedtime. I talked to God in church, during mass which I still attended with the family, or anytime I wanted to ask for something. (Later I found out I had cut the middleman, the first step in simplifying.)

Some of the things I asked for were as childish as a gold medal in a high school contest, some were as big as healing and long life for my parents, or protection from accidents for the whole family. I asked for few things, but I know all of them were heard, and granted. As my batting average grew, my tolerance for the superfluous shrunk. I was getting results talking to God directly, so why memorize prayers, names of saints, their birthdays, their functional specialties, and similar stuff? Why even go to mass?

Growing up I also found that if I focused on one or two things I really enjoyed, I might be good at it. I was good at playing but not competing, so making friends was easy. I loved reading and writing and didn’t care about report cards, so school was a breeze. After attempting violin, guitar, drawing, basketball, tennis, even boxing with the gloves and speedball my father gave me, I gave up because I was lousy at all of them. Lack of talent and ability compelled me to keep things simple. A car is needed to take one from point A to point B, which a VW Beetle, then a Toyota Corolla, does. I had only one girl friend and married her after a year. She’s still my wife after 44 years. We still keep the first bank account we opened 45 years ago, when Citibank was still called FNCB.

Sure, there were many problems, jobs, heartaches, temptations along the way, but I stuck to the main point. Keep it simple.

People who can facebook, paint toenails, listen to rock, and do homework while texting amaze me. I am essentially a one-at-a-time person. Multitasking confounds me. Can we really do everything? Some people can, though, and I admire them. But I keep it simple.

I have long ago given up on pleasing everyone. Is it even possible, or worth it? Can we be
everything to every one? Any one?

“Believe,” we are told many times, “and you will have eternal life.” Is it that easy? Is it that simple? Yes, it is, but we still doubt. We want things complicated.

I also learned something about stuff.

When a good friend decided to consolidate his homes in Manila, Hong Kong, and San Francisco into one house, the clutter he collected living in three locations could have filled a small Home Depot. He had beds, tv sets, refrigerators, stoves, appliances, pans and cutlery, furniture, tons of clothing and shoes for four seasons, golf and fishing gear, hundreds of books, many of them same titles bought at airports throughout the world, thousands of tools, gadgets, artifacts and countless remnants of profuse spending. He had retired in his mid-forties and was planning to build the rest of his life around golfing in California, fishing in Malaysia, New Zealand, or the Caribbean, and touring the world.

Amid this wealth of confusion, he told me, “You know one thing I discovered? Only a few things really matter to me: a couple of shirts, two pairs of jeans and my Swiss army knife.”

But he was talking to a long-time collector of sunsets, cool breezes, and walks on the beach, so of course I readily identified with him.

“I know.” I said, “I have nothing, so I simplify.”