Plain and Simple A Journey to the Amish Chapter One How It Began Can an object go straight to your heart ? Twenty years ago I walked into Latham's Men's Store in Sag Harbor, New York, and saw old quilts used as a background for men's tweeds. I had never seen quilts like that. Odd color combinations. Deep saturated solid colors: purple, mauve, green, brown, magenta, electric blue, red. Simple geometric forms: squares, diamonds, rectangles. A patina of use emanated from them. They spoke directly to me. They knew something. They went straight to my heart. That was the beginning. Innocent enough. How opposite my life was from an Amish quilt. My life was like a CRAZY QUILT, a pattern I hated. Hundreds of scattered, unrelated, stimulating fragments, each, going off in its own direction, creating a lot of frantic energy. There was no overall structure to hold the pieces together. The Crazy Quilt was a perfect metaphor for my life. A tug-of-war was raging inside me. In contrast to the muted colors of the Amish, I saw myself in extremes: a black-and-white person who made black-and-white ceramics and organized her life around a series of black-and-white judgments. I divided my world into two lists. All the "creative" things -- the things I valued, being an artist, thinking of myself as undisciplined and imaginative -- were on one side, and the boring, everyday things -- those deadly, ordinary chores that everyone has to do, the things I thought distracted me from living an artistic life-were on the other side. I was an ex-New Yorker living most of the time in Berkeley, California; a wife and mother of two sons; an artist and a therapist with two graduate degrees, one from Harvard, one from Berkeley. That was my resume. I valued accomplishments. I valued being special. I valued results. The driven part didn't question or examine these values. It took them as real, and believed it was following the carrot "success" whole heartedly. Didn't everyone believe in success? I never asked, "Success at what cost?" A part of me is quiet. It knows about simplicity, about commitment, and the joy of doing what I do well. That part is the artist, the child -- it is receptive and has infinite courage. But time and my busyness drowned the quiet voice. In the world in which I grew up, more choices meant a better life. It was true for both my parents and my grandparents. I was brought up to believe that the more choices I had, the better. Never having enough time, I wanted it all, a glutton for new experience. Excited, attracted, distracted, tempted in all directions, I thought I was lucky to have so many choices and I naively believed I could live them all. A tyranny of lists engulfed me. The lists created the illusion that my life was full. I would wake at five A.M. eager to begin. The first thing I did was compose my Things to Do list. This gave me great pleasure, even though the list was nothing more than a superimposed heap o choices, representing all the things I enjoyed doing and all th things I had to do, crowding and bumping against each other. An organized person would have said "This is ridiculous. It's unrealistic. No one could accomplish so many things in one day." Sometimes I would stop in the middle of the day, when the scene on the page looked especially chaotic, and rewrite the list, never thinking to take anything off, but hoping the newly transformed neat rows would overcome my feeling of being overwhelmed. I was a balancing act on one foot --,even when I was doing something I enjoyed, my mind jumped about, thinking of what was next or my list. I never thought to stop and ask myself, "What really matters?' Instead, I gave everything equal weight. I had no way to select what was important and what was not. Things that were important didn't get done, and others, quite unimportant, were completed and crossed off the list. Accumulating choices was a way of not having to make a choice but I didn't know that at the time. To eliminate anything was a foreign concept. I felt deprived if I let go of any choices. By evening, the list had become a battlefield of hieroglyphics; crossed-off areas, checks and circles, plus the many temptations added during the day. The circles were there to remind me of all the tasks that didn't get done. Tomorrow's list began with today's leftovers. I never questioned my frantic behavior. When I looked around, most of my friends were like me, scurrying around and complaining that they never had the time to do all the things they really wanted to do. Only now, looking back, can I hear a child's voice inside me calling "STOP, I want to get off. The merry-go-round is spinning faster and faster. Please make it stop." At the time I thought I was extremely lucky. But something was missing, and though I could not have said what that "something" was, I was always searching, believing there was something out there -- and if only I could find it. That "if only" kept me trying to change. I took classes-trying to improve, hoping I'd be a better person. A friend laughed, "I'll know you've changed when you stop trying to change." I didn't know that my addiction to unrelenting activity produced a quiet desperation that permeated every cell of my being. In the world of "if only," nothing I was doing would ever be enough. Spinning frantically, I left myself out. I had become an artist by chance. In 1960, three months before the birth of my first child, I stopped teach ng history at New Rochelle High School in New York and joined a clay class. The timing was perfect: I had planned to miss only three months of teaching before school began again in September. I never returned. In those few months, I fell in love with clay. Clay was soft and responsive. It had its own rhythm, its own heartbeat, a timing sensitive to moods and the atmosphere, just like a person. It didn't make demands, but it did ask me to pay attention and to listen. I thought being receptive meant being "out of control," so I had a lot of difficulty with that part of the relationship. On damp days, the clay took longer to harden. Impatient, I put the pieces in my kitchen oven, willing them to dry faster. Plain and Simple A Journey to the Amish . Copyright © by Sue Bender. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Plain and Simple: A Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
