Simple pleasures of life

 

I just finished reading Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, better known as the author of The Little Prince.  Wind, Sand and Stars is filled with his memories as a pilot in Africa.  He describes a life of adventure.  He enjoys the dangers of flying in a time when, as he put it, airplanes tended to fall apart in the sky.  He wrote many words on the idea of what it means to be living a life. To live is the point of being alive, and to live means more than waking up every day and simply going about a daily routine.  He felt sorry for people who didn’t struggle and fight for life, for those who didn’t sleep under a deep bed of stars alone on the desert floor, who didn’t know the sound of an airplane engine stuttering as it crossed tall mountain peaks.  He wanted the travail of life, the living of life.  I agree and yet I also love simple pleasures.

Recently my daughter, son in law and I crossed the country on a grand adventure.  We saw the Arch in St. Louis, attended a baseball game, drove through Kansas and Colorado, and backpacked for three days among the snow-capped peaks. This was, for me, grand adventure, living a life, and every bit as wonderful as it sounds.  But, another wonderful moment stands out, a simple one.  On the way back from this trip I spent a few nights at my dad’s house. One of those nights I strung up my hammock in his backyard, and slept under the stars, and under the leaves of the trees.  I listened to the neighbor’s rooster and to the strange call of their peacock.  I woke early, and ate dew covered blackberries just starting to warm from the sun.  Inside I shared a hot coffee with my dad.  This is the beauty of simple pleasure.

 

Saint Exupéry also enjoyed the simple pleasures.  He wrote long beautiful paragraphs about sitting alone on the top of a sand dune surveying the empty lands all around.  He described sitting under stars so plentiful he felt dizzy, and could feel the spinning of the earth through space.  I think all pleasures are simple ones.  It is when they become too complex, too involved, then they become manufactured and artificial, and at this point they are no longer pleasures.  Once we try too hard, the pleasure becomes the created moment.  The created moment isn’t real.  The stars are real, blackberries are real, simple pleasures are real.