A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

A walk is the smallest sort of journey we can ever undertake. It stands in relation to a typical holiday as a bonsai tree does to a forest. But even if it is only an eight-minute interlude around the block or a few moments in a nearby park, a walk is already a journey in which many of the grander themes of travel are present.

We crave simplicity not because we are simple, but because we are drowning in complexity.

Our preoccupation with money feels highly respectable, but its true cause is poignant and unexpected: we keep wanting more money because we haven’t yet identified a passion that matters enough to us that it replaces money-making in our minds.

the taste of an era or a society reveals what people want more of but don’t actually feel they securely possess.

Very often, the truly significant news is trapped inside our own mind – but the crush of news from without hampers our ability to pick up on our own tentative thoughts and emerging ideas. The news gives us one of the most prestigious excuses ever invented to never spend time roaming freely inside our own thoughts. Of course, the news that is broadc

Earlier epochs didn’t emphasise simplicity because there was no need to; a life with few possessions and plain food, early nights and plenty of time in the fresh air was available to everyone. But for us, simplicity plays the role that splendour once did for the aristocrats at Versailles or that rugged individualism did for the urban 20th-century a

what am I reading for? And this time, rather than answering, ‘In order to know everything,’ we might decide on a much more limited, focused and useful goal. We might decide that while society as a whole is on a search for total knowledge, all we really need is to gather the knowledge that is going to be useful to us as we lead our own lives.

If we are able to foster a parental perspective on ourselves, irrespective of what the rest of the world happens to think, we can legitimately (and without falling into narcissistic exaggeration), see ourselves as honourable and worthy of regard – despite everything.

However, a period of quiet thinking, alone in our room, provides an occasion for the mind to order and understand itself. Fears, resentments and hopes become easier to name; we grow less scared of the contents of our own minds – and less resentful, calmer and clearer about our direction. We start, in faltering steps, to know ourselves slightly bett