“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” —Henry David Thoreau

Over 150 years ago, a man walked into the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, to discover the secret of life. His name was Henry David Thoreau. He wanted, as he put it, “to live deliberately”—to strip existence down to its essentials and see what remained. He wanted to live a simple life.

What he found was that: less is enough. In fact, less is more than enough.

Two thousand years before Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, another teacher wandered the hills of Galilee with the same message. Jesus of Nazareth could have had anything—power, wealth, prestige. He rejected it all to live simply among simple people, teaching that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those with the spirit of a child.

The world has changed dramatically since both walked the earth. And yet, the trap they warned us about remains exactly the same. Consider your morning: You wake up, and before your feet touch the floor, your hand reaches for a glowing screen. Messages flood in—demands, anxieties, opinions, other people’s crises. You answer some, only to find more waiting. Hours pass. You’ve been awake, but have you been alive? This is the quiet captivity of modern existence: being perpetually busy with other people’s urgencies while neglecting your own.

Thoreau called it “lives of quiet desperation.” We might call it something else—scrolling, grinding, hustling, keeping up with the Joneses. But the disease is the same: we have surrendered our time, our attention, our very selves to things that do not nourish us. And here lies the uncomfortable truth: the things you own end up owning you. The wardrobes. The gadgets. The endless upgrades. Each possession demands space, maintenance, worry. Each commitment crowds out the sacred silence where the soul finds rest.

Why do people live this way? Is it fear? Fear of stepping away from the herd. Fear of disappointing others—even one’s own parents. Fear of abandoning the autopilot existence that everyone else seems to accept. Fear of being thought strange, unsuccessful, less than. But what if “less than” is actually more than? What if the simple life is not deprivation but liberation?

Jesus understood this. When he said, “Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” he wasn’t speaking of naïveté. He was speaking of freedom—freedom from the accumulated weight of status and stuff, freedom to wonder, to trust, to simply be. Living simply requires courage. It means disappointing those whose expectations differ from your own. It means choosing depth over breadth, presence over productivity, being over having. Simply Being is the rarest state of the modern mind. 

We have only one life to live. Shouldn’t it be ours?

The world will tell you success is measured in acquisitions—homes, titles, followers, net worth. But consider a different accounting: True success is laughing often and loving deeply. It is winning the respect of honest people and the guileless affection of children. It is appreciating beauty wherever it appears—in a sunset, in a stranger’s kindness, in the face of someone you love. It is leaving this world a little better than you found it, whether raising a healthy or a special child, tending your garden, or simply being someone others could breathe easier around. This kind of success cannot be bought. It can only be lived.

Thoreau went to the woods because he understood something essential: we are part of nature, and in nature, we find proper scale. Stand beneath a starry sky at night. Feel how small you are—and yet how wonderfully, mysteriously connected to something vast and eternal. This is where simplicity begins: in the recognition that we are not the center of the universe, but honored participants in its unfolding. Nature strips away pretense. It reminds us of what matters. It returns us to the source who made us, not for consumption, but for communion.

So here is the invitation, as ancient as Galilee and as fresh as morning dew: Simplify. Release what does not serve you. Step back from the endless noise. Make room for silence, for prayer, for the people you love. Stop living someone else’s life. Stop being a carbon copy when you were made to be an original. The simple life is not about poverty—it is about freedom, about discovering that true luxury is having time for yourself and for others, time to simply be.  

The lord promised that his yoke was easy, his burden light. Perhaps this is what He meant when we stop carrying what was never ours to carry. As we prepare for Christmas, the ultimate example of simplicity, give yourself permission to live a simple life. If the first Christmas was so simple, your life can be simple too. Stop worrying. “Each day,” the lord reminds us, ” has enough problems of its own.” But, enough is always less than what we’ve been conditioned to have.

And in that enough, we find everything.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy, Ph.D.