On overcomplicating things

Or, saying less but more often.

As I walk down to the beach, I am thinking about how I tend to overcomplicate things.

I’ve been trying to learn a simpler, gentler way of moving through life: one goal at a time rather than ten, one thing at a time rather than ten, going slowly and in stages. But this busyness of mind and hands, this lean towards perfection, this spilling over of concepts and tangents and ideas and how it all excites me - it’s hard to tame. As with almost all things in our nature that hinder us, it can also be a help, perhaps even a strength. But I’ve noticed many times how it can leave me immobile. The sheer volume of possibility is overwhelming, and the desire to do it well even more so. It’s easier to put it aside and come back to later (aka never).

As I wade into the waves, I remember a conversation with my pastor a few months ago. He’d invited me to speak at church, and one Sunday I told him how I was attempting to prepare but I wasn’t sure what I was really trying to say. “My brain isn’t working well these days” I probably laughed.

“It’s the trap, isn’t it,” he said to me. “When you’re asked to do it once, you have so many ideas and you want to cover them all. When you do it every week, you realise that just one small idea will do.”

I’ve been wanting to write more, but my brain has been spilling over with too many ideas. When I think about writing—or I do in fact try to do it—it’s like I’m trying to assembly a child’s play tent but the pieces don’t quite fit and the connecting bits are missing, even though I could swear I’d done it before. Meanwhile the child (me) grumbles about how it’s taking too long, and now they’re hungry, and “you’re just not doing it right!” A lot of this has had to do with my stage of life: not enough space or quiet for my brain to mull, not enough energy to focus or find clarity, heavy eyelids in the evening when I consider sitting at a computer. But if I’m honest, it’s also because I make it more complicated than it needs to be.

And here it is, an uncomplicated idea to help me with my over complicated problem: rather than trying to say it all, just do it more often and try to say less. The connections will find themselves, if they need to at all.

I smile at the simplicity of it, at our mind’s ability to draw forward the memories and insights we are fumbling for at moments like these, and at how so often the natural world is the midwife for such moments.

I finally fully submerge myself in the water; watch some seagulls skim the water’s surface.

I think of an idea from Stan Grant’s new book: of putting aside identity and a focus on “who we are” to consider instead “where we are”.¹

I suppose when I’m in nature and especially submerged in water—closer to country physically and spiritually—all of the noise around who I am and who I’m trying to be can fade. Instead I simply am where I am.

This is a long way of saying I hope to show up here to say less but more often. Thanks for coming along for the journey.

1. This idea is originally noted in connection with language: “I asked Dad why he teaches our language to people who are not Wiradjuri—because language is not who you are—it teaches you where you are.” He then goes on to unpack this idea of where rather than who: “To say where we are—not who—turns modernity on its head. I have never heard my father use the word identity—he has no use for it.” I probably didn’t need to include this footnote, but the ideas Stan generously unpacks in his book were too deep for me to skim over and apply in a shallow way to my own experiences. Listen here to Stan Grant and his father Stan Grant Snr talk about his amazing work reviving the Wiradjuri language.