donger need food.

The Simple Things in Life

So I'm reading The Tao Of Pooh and it hits me...why do I make things so difficult? One of the centerpieces of the story is how Pooh goes through life, enjoying all the simple things. Not overthinking things, overprocessing, or being knowledgeable just for the sake of being knowledgeable. And time and time again, I always get stung by making things so complicated for myself...

Like reading this and me going off on this huge tangent about all these miniscule things that impact the calculation...completely overlooking one of the basic premises that I learned in high school physics -- mass is irrelevant in falling objects.

Or when I'm trying to figure out why da heck my car's subwoofer isn't working (it hasn't been working for weeks now) -- my mind went off racing into a million little complicated things:

• The patch cord from the head unit to the sub's amp could've been severed (it's chafing on the driver seat rails since I haven't gotten around to running it under the carpet yet)
• Maybe I forgot to disconnect the speaker wires when I was moving, and caused a short that blew the amp
• Maybe the gain setting got thrown off
• Maybe the power cable from the battery that runs through the firewall broke somehow.
  

It couldn't be the obvious, that the connection at the speaker was broken. This was the first thing I checked when I suspected it wasn't working...I tugged on the wires, they were in there solid. No, it couldn't be. So tonight, I decided to finally figure this crap out. Unplugged the head unit's signal, plugged in my iRiver directly to the amp...no sound. Hrmph. Gain? Nope. Switched inputs... Still no joy. There's definitely power, the LED is on. Grrrr...decided to unmount the woofer's box and look at the speaker connection again. Crap. The wire was fed into the spring clip, not the actual place where the wire was supposed to go. AAAAARGH. Simple.

And life always just gets so heavy when I let complex things get in the way. Things are always so much better when it's reduced to the simple essence of the moment. Like tonight...I got all this crap to do at work, but I took the time to put on an old favorite on the stereo, and make the stuffed pork chops that I've been putting off for a while now. Chopping the onions, apricots, garlic, while Trisha is filling the walls of my old apartment with words of breaking out on her own...aaaah, joy. Preparing the chops I think back to the moment I was inspired to go out and buy my first Trisha Yearwood CD: It was a late afternoon at college, I was tired from a day full of lectures about memory leaks and call by reference...I hopped on the trusty North Parking shuttle, the driver had KSON cranked in the sparsely populated bus. The sun was setting over Torrey Pines, and The Song Remembers When came on. Something about the moment of it all...the warmth of the setting sun on the side of my face through the large tinted windows, the rough synthetic feel of my black nylon knapsack holding my Data Structures book; the anticipation of hopping into my car and exploring some great uncharted destination; and acceptance of the fact that the girl I really wanted to get with had moved on to bigger and brighter things...

Simple.

posted by VirtualErn @ 10:05 PM

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]