The Beauty of Keeping Everything the Same

The new sounds so much more exciting than the old.  

It brings us supercharged thrills—fresh, newly-released, never-before-seen, innovative, pioneering… the words sizzle and sing.

We can’t help ourselves. Life is short, and we want it all.

What is the merit in keeping the old? The old furniture, clothes, routine, or tradition?

Some languages are as extinct as dinosaurs. Traditional crafts and trades are dying. Young people have no interest in learning them. YouTube and TikTok videos offer endless entertainment to keep us riding the new wave. Someone somewhere is always doing the things we haven’t tried before. How thrilling.

Our minds are filled with random facts and images. We panic when realizing the phone is left at home. We can’t stand doing nothing, or even focusing on one thing at a time.

Everything becomes necessary, so we feel stressed. We keep buying more new things to deal with the stress.

Maybe it’s time to simplify our lives. Get rid of the excess and live with the basics. When we stop buying new things, we appreciate more of the old. We learn to fix things, rather than replacing them. We notice beauty in those tiny wildflowers, and find pleasure in ordinary things.

I came across this article about a man who ate the same dinner for ten years. He has been a farmer in Welsh all his life. He says, “People might think I’m not experiencing new things, but I think the secret to a good life is to enjoy your work… Autumn is my favourite time of the year, with all the colours of the leaves: it’s just beautiful. Cuckoos come here every April, and I look forward to hearing them. A lot of people, locals and birdwatchers, come here wanting to hear the cuckoo, but they don’t stop long enough; sometimes they don’t even leave their cars… it pains me that others don’t get to enjoy it.”

“If someone offered me [2 million pounds] to move, I would tell them to keep it. Most evenings I walk right up to the top of the valley. I look down and everything looks small and far away. And I feel like I’m on top of the world.”

What do you think?

Originally published on https://www.ivyge.com

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