Being Simple

When he walked in the office with a smile, he appeared to be someone with a lot hidden behind that smile. He was the new employee our company had hired and was supposed to fit at a crucial place in the team. I will not tell what his role was as there is no reason to have him identified. Being identified may disturb him. After all he was a simple person!!

A few weeks after he started with the team, he became famous for his statement, “I am a simple person and want to keep things simple.” It can be an official discussion or favorite food, favorite movie or any discussion, he would always being the “being simple” mantra in it. And everything was fine as being simple is a good thing.

A few more weeks and things started getting cleared. He was certainly living by his mantra, and here is how

He had made his alphabet book very Simple by deleting all the ‘non significant’ alphabets, and was left with three out of 26. E, I and M; which he very simply will arrange in only one order. I stayed alone as uppercase “ I.” M stays always as capital M with a lowercase “e” as the 2^nd alphabet in the word. And that was it. So his dictionary was simple too, two words “I” and “Me”.

You may think he would use other words like Mine, ours etc. But No, he didn’t as stated earlier, he wanted things simple. So ‘mine’ may suggest that there are other things in the universe, though he owns them but sill those things are there, and the existence of other things was unnecessary complexity to his I/Me world. So there was nothing that he wanted to associate with as his.

Better yet was his dealing with other. ‘You’ are not good, ‘you’ are not bad either, ‘you ‘ don’t exist as you cannot exist when I have only I and me in my dictionary. You if at all are unnecessary hindrance and unwanted complexity to the situation that is so at peace with my three letters World.

He started getting very irritated after some months as there were so many complex alphabet groups roaming around in office corridors that shouldn’t be there as they don’t exist. If they try to exist then they were just being annoyance to his peaceful simplicity.

He always had the best idea, the best solution the best plan as any suggestion rooted external to him was noise from unknown sources that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Somehow everyone felt that he was missing the peace that he longed for so much that he has tried to simplify things, may be bit too much. Many months and many fights later he gave up. No! He did not give up on the “being simple” mantra, but he gave up the fight and cursed the “unwanted/ almost nonexistent” noise sources for creating unnecessary complexity in his otherwise Simple life. And sometime later he moved to another job in the search of peace that simplicity should bring.

We all sit and discuss the work in meetings seeing each other listening to each other agreeing or disagreeing with each other and deep inside thinking, were we really that much of a nuisance to his “simple living”. I don’t know the answer, I know people who have tried to use three other letters to make things simpler, y, o and u in that particular order. I have done that at times and that always seems to work. It works as long as the three letters from his alphabet book don’t overshadow the picture.

I still think simple is easy with all the 26 letters live in harmony and creating millions of words. True there will be some clutter, but still it would be simple!!!!!