Simplicity from Complexity

As we dumble along day by day routines manage much of our life. Getting up from bed is automatic. Fixing something to eat. Shaving and showering. Catching up with the Internet, emails and other daily writing tasks. All fall into a routine that makes it easy to get things done.

Unusual duties are a little more complicated. Making doctor appointments, keeping the same, and following instructions all have a logical line of task associated with each other. It only gets more complicated if other doctors are involved near the same time.  Keeping it all separate and in focus is a struggle. But then in time these duties are repeated often enough one comes to expect how they will occur as well as their results.  The complex has become routine. Routine tends to simplify matters.

Same with commuting. Have you ever stopped to consider the complexity of this daily routine? Some of us walked to the train station, waited on the platform for the scheduled ride, got to know the same people week after week, month after month (year after year, oh, stop me!). Then the ride, the same riders over the long haul as well as the conductors and ticket takers. Once downtown Chicago, another walk to the office. The schedule. The office door, open or locked? The call to security to report my entry if before hours. In time the easy relationship with campus police as they got to know my early morning schedule, and my understanding their security ritual as well.  And of course, the return home commute, undoing what we so painstakingly constructed early in the morning to get to work in the first place!

I remember wondering how my father would have handled such a complicated commute. Four hours each day spent getting to and from work in a megalopolis of 8 million or more. Traffic heavy enough to choke the globe. But all simplified by routine. A rote practice. Year after year.

Actually I learned years later that my commute had been healthy. It burned calories, it refused to accept fat on my body, it charged my metabolism so my physical functions were steady and ever ready while my mind shared the alertness and readiness. It was a heady time but I think now the commute made it so.

Another aspect of this experience: four hours of commuting is a lot of time to decompress from one aspect of life to another, from home to work, from work to home, and so forth. It also gives a person an opportunity to think through complex issues, sorting out the important from the not so important.

Yes, the complex commute provided simplicity in my life so other complexities could be admitted and handled.

At my stage of life I have witnessed many comings and goings of friends and family. Births and deaths repeated in patterns that never end. As it always has been and always will be. The complexity of life is made simple in some ways by the simplicity of death. The switch has gone off for one life. But the associations, loves, likes and dreams of the deceased live on in the survivors. This may not seem so for one who has experienced the loss of a loved one, it seems so huge and insurmountable. But time will teach another lesson that the loss provides the gift of insight. And value of the other’s life and reach.

There are those we know who struggle with the dying of a loved one over a long period of time. They are prepared we think for the final loss when it arrives. But I think we would be wrong in that thinking. The loss is a real point in time. It forces our thinking to dwell on the person’s absence from our life and what that will mean. It enables us to better understand what that person’s life meant to us before and now. The two are likely to be different. Odd isn't it?  Think about that for a while.

Of course there are those who lose a spouse or parent suddenly, unexpectedly. The shock of it is its own loss. But then there is the actual loss of the person still to be handled. And there are deaths by tragic accident, horrid disasters, filling our minds with the last moments of that person’s life as they came to understand their end. We hope not to experience that sort of end. We wish our loved one had not as well.

But death is death, the final stop for that one person’s ride in life. The mystery is not in the loss, I think. No. The mystery is in making the most of life before death for oneself, and then valuing others while they are still with us.

Death makes us think of these things. And the lessons keep coming. From the complex comes the simple, and the meaning.

At least one hopes for that.

April 14, 2014