Simplicity

 From Hazelden's 24 Hour A Day book: "Simplicity is the keynote of a good life.  Choose the simple things always.  Life can be complicated if you let it be so.  You can be swamped by difficulties if you let them take up too much of your time.  Every difficulty can be either solved or ignored and something better substituted for it.  Love the simple things.  Your standard must never be the world's standard of wealth and power."

This passage amused me because SuperK and I had been talking yesterday about this particular daily meditation book, one which was read before every meeting in Chicago when we were getting sober, even though it's not an A.A. approved text and is full of pretty Christian sounding thinking.  I picked it up a few weeks ago after I had finished another spiritual book I had been reading - also a non-A.A. approved book, come to think of it.  We had been kicking around some thinking about social media and how it can insidiously trick us into comparing ourselves to other people all of the time.  This is bad enough but the real evil is that we're often comparing ourselves to highly curated and manipulated images of other people presenting the picture to the world that they want the world to see.  No one posts a picture on Facebook of themselves morosely sitting on a couch, depressed, wearing a sweat shirt with pizza stains on it.  We're dressed up, hair combed, big smiles on our faces, doing really fun and cool things.   

BTW - I hate all of those big toothy, fake, overly joyous smiles I see when people post pictures of themselves.  I don't run into everyone walking around with those big deceptions plastered on their faces when I'm out in public.  Isn't anyone ever sad?  Doesn't anyone just have a normal scowling grimace to present to the world?  You cannot be that fucking happy all the time.  It looks so transparently fake to me.  Yeah, I know your folks shelled out $7500 for braces when you were growing up.  Maybe you should post the occasional picture of yourself cleaning the toilet or picking up your dog's dog poop or any other feces related activity that you think would hold our attention.

This bit of spiritual advice was funny because my wife inadvertently opened up the Facebook page of a sibling with whom she has a strained relationship.  And there she was, the oldest child overextending herself in a manner than I - as an in-law and not as a member of the nuclear family - find to be stressful.  This woman is obviously one of those people who had the Do part of living down pat while completely ignoring the Be part.  And SuperK's reaction is to feel