A Simple Life

You want a simple life and you told me that you wanted to spend your days feeling happy and appreciated and doing anything you wanted to do.  Of course you don’t want to be uncomfortable or have to suffer or work very hard either. So what exactly is a simple life anyway?  You said you hated your job and that the place you lived in was too polluted and you wanted to go somewhere else.  Suddenly this simple life involves relocation to achieve and that involves a lot of paperwork  and money.  Let’s just suppose that someone provided the funds and sorted out all the paperwork for you.  Now what?

You set off for your simple life in let’s say England (a country I know well).  You find a nice little shop with a comfortable apartment upstairs in a pretty little village with a mini-mart, post office and a couple of nice pubs.  You start up a little tea shop just for fun and spend your time talking to occasional visitors and retired folk.  Is this a simple life?  It is certainly an ideal life but how practical are you being.  There are bills to pay and you need a very good Summer to pay for a slow Winter.  So you spend the Summer working very hard with not much time off as there is plenty of time when the cold weather comes.  You spend your days in the shop and your evenings baking cakes and life begins to form a pattern.  You feel happier as you take long walks in the countryside.  You discover new sounds like the thud of raindrops on chestnut leaves.

Days follow days and become weeks that become years and sitting one day watching your garden glowing green after Spring rain has washed the leaves you think again of the city you left so long ago.  You remember how the lights twinkled across the bay and the skyscrapers soared through the early morning mist.  You can hear again the sounds of the market and the exotic smells of a thousand edible things. You remember me and how I stood at the airport with tears falling from my eyes saying  good bye as you turned from our city life to follow your dream. A sudden ache grips your very being and you know in that moment that your dream was just a dream without the one you loved.

Written in Faversham Kent November 1999