Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
One of my favorite phrases is 'short, sweet and simple'. It may sound cliched and done-to-death, but for me it is very relevant and meaningful. Simple is pure, simple is childlike, simple is credible. Simple is absence of complication, pretentiousness and incredulity.
Our basic needs are simple. Food, water, shelter and clothes. One may add to this some basic comforts necessary for surviving the complexity of urban life. Anything more is a complex set of desires known and peddled as luxuries.
As children we learn about kisses much before we understand the K-I-S-S principle. Of course, when we are small kids we usually 'Keep It Simple and act Stupid/ Silly! Or, at least, that's what elders would like to believe. We have simple wants and needs, simple likes and dislikes. Then we grow up. And the fact that we haven't experienced our first kiss becomes a complex problem.
Some of the best things in life are simple. Love is simple. No really. It gets complicated, isn't it? Girl meets/ looks at/ is spotted by/ passes by/ etc. boy. Cupid strikes one of them, in most cases; both of them, rarely. The rest, and intellectually inclined historians would hate to admit, is what history books are made of. Id, ego and super-ego take over in a Freudian battle of the sexes, even as boy and girl aver 'it's complicated'.
How about a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols? In another words, language. Hasn't that become a victim of complexity too. It would be simplistic and tad lazy on my behalf to cite the Chetan Bhagat vs. the classes argument here. Instead, let me share something I found on the internet a few years ago. Unfortunately, I won't be able to credit the original author as I have lost the source of this piece:
In promulgating your esoteric cogitation or articulating your
superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or
psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.
Let your conversational communications possess a compacted
conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency, and a concatenated consistency.
Eschew obfuscation and all conglomeration of flatulent garrulity,
jejune babblement, and asinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descanting and unpremeditated expatiation have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.
Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy,
and vain vapid verbosity.
What the author is trying to say here is keep your language clear, concise and lucid. In other words short, sweet and simple!
Confucius
One of my favorite phrases is 'short, sweet and simple'. It may sound cliched and done-to-death, but for me it is very relevant and meaningful. Simple is pure, simple is childlike, simple is credible. Simple is absence of complication, pretentiousness and incredulity.
Our basic needs are simple. Food, water, shelter and clothes. One may add to this some basic comforts necessary for surviving the complexity of urban life. Anything more is a complex set of desires known and peddled as luxuries.
As children we learn about kisses much before we understand the K-I-S-S principle. Of course, when we are small kids we usually 'Keep It Simple and act Stupid/ Silly! Or, at least, that's what elders would like to believe. We have simple wants and needs, simple likes and dislikes. Then we grow up. And the fact that we haven't experienced our first kiss becomes a complex problem.
Some of the best things in life are simple. Love is simple. No really. It gets complicated, isn't it? Girl meets/ looks at/ is spotted by/ passes by/ etc. boy. Cupid strikes one of them, in most cases; both of them, rarely. The rest, and intellectually inclined historians would hate to admit, is what history books are made of. Id, ego and super-ego take over in a Freudian battle of the sexes, even as boy and girl aver 'it's complicated'.
How about a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols? In another words, language. Hasn't that become a victim of complexity too. It would be simplistic and tad lazy on my behalf to cite the Chetan Bhagat vs. the classes argument here. Instead, let me share something I found on the internet a few years ago. Unfortunately, I won't be able to credit the original author as I have lost the source of this piece:
In promulgating your esoteric cogitation or articulating your
superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or
psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.
Let your conversational communications possess a compacted
conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency, and a concatenated consistency.
Eschew obfuscation and all conglomeration of flatulent garrulity,
jejune babblement, and asinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descanting and unpremeditated expatiation have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.
Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy,
and vain vapid verbosity.
What the author is trying to say here is keep your language clear, concise and lucid. In other words short, sweet and simple!
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