My brief essay appears on Monday’s River Teeth Journal‘s “Beautiful Things.” Please have a look or even comment: https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2019/09/30/simplify-simplify

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Perhaps not everyone fantasizes about a simpler life, but I know I am not alone in imagining that complication might be set aside. To walk streets without concern or worry, to simplify.

It is a paradox. What does not fit upon my thumbnail, those details that exceed the fingers of one hand plus one, are still of matter. Life is not only engagement with two or three but always of dozens, and in the larger sense they encompass multitudes, the entire world.