Life Made Easier

"Real Simple: Life Made Easier" the magazine on the coffee table reads. I'm sitting in a coffee-shop in Montana, comforting myself with the noise of people, ordering their breakfast for today. And while I sit, eyes on the magazine, the stereo plays John Lennon's 'Imagine'.

I can feel tears in my eyes, struck by how life isn't real simple for anyone all of the time, and how for some of us comfort and safety are hard to come by.

"Real Simple" is a magazine advertising what we all long for: simplicity, life made easier. We thought we'd have less paper ten years ago when we started using computers, more and more exclusively. But, I hear we use more--more paper, more things available for us to buy from places and people we'll never meet or see, more information coming our way, more games to lose ourselves in so that all that isn't simple in this world becomes manageable in a 'Second Life'.

What is it that we as a culture so desperately long for that a company can sell a magazine promising "Life Made Easier"? What do I long for, past remodeling my kitchen or the safe delivery of our first grandchild or my mother's well-being as she sits miles from me in what appears to be an endless fog?

None of that in my own life seems "Real Simple," and there are no promises or guarantees. And when there are no promises or guarantees, how do we bring babies into the world with worry of global warming showing up in tranquil Montana as glaciers melt?

There is so much to know in today's world, all with the flip of a switch and even a computer illiterate fifty-eight year old has access to knowledge and information beyond her wildest dreams.

Yet, the baby who is coming will have that aura all around him of the simple and the
immediate--not the "Real Simple" of clean organized kitchen drawers--but presence. He will for years emanate simplicity and teach his grandmother all about it, in the moment. And it is mine to learn again.