On Living with Complexity

Is it really so bad?

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A million years ago, or thereabouts, I found myself counting the days until the end of a French exchange trip. Lots of my British schoolfriends were doing it—getting paired with a teen on the other side of the English Channel and each spending a week or two hosted by their counterpart’s family.

Mine was thoroughly unsatisfactory but largely because I was a thoroughly unsatisfactory teenager—unadventurous, uninteresting, unattractive and painfully shy. Being thrown into a group of supercool young French people simply enhanced my feelings of inadequacy. So in my mental filing cabinet of memories, I shoved this one into the bottom drawer.

Until recently.

While taking stock of the various parts of my life, a memory of that trip popped into my head. It was of the time when the coolest of the cool French teens asked if he could read my palm. I was deeply suspicious. He seemed an unlikely palmist. Plus he was very good looking and extremely sexy, so I felt sure he was toying with me—the frumpy foreigner with ill-fitting jeans and long frizzy hair—as a cat does with its prey before tearing it apart.

He insisted. I acquiesced. After a few moments gazing blankly at my hand, his expression morphed into one of extreme surprise. “You will live a long life,” he began (or whatever the French version of that is). “But look! Look how many lines you have. Your life will go in many, many directions.”

I was crestfallen. I felt he’d just delivered a damning indictment of my feeble, unfocused character. And, of course, I’d secretly hoped he’d tell me that a dark handsome French stranger was about to come into my life (in your dreams, I’d quickly told myself).

But as I look at my palm today, with dozens of tiny creases fanning out from its four principal lines, it strikes me that he was absolutely right. I live on two continents, keeping up with friends on both. As an author, journalist and freelance writer I have multiple projects and several books on the go at any one time. I host salon events at my home and I speak at conferences and workshops. And I’ve just added something else: this Substack newsletter.

The component parts of my life—those tiny creases on my palm—all require various degrees of attention. At times, the complexity drives me mad, leaving me feeling torn in different directions or simply overwhelmed. My laptop always has dozens of windows open at the same time. I’m a jack of all trades and master of none.

So should I downsize, simplify and streamline?

There’s been a lot of chatter about this in recent years. We’re told we need to de-clutter our lives, reduce our commitments, focus on fewer things. OK, so I can certainly do that in my physical space. In fact, my friends know me as something of a neat freak. But whenever I hear talk about embracing a life described as “simple,” my mind tends to wander towards words like “dull” or “small.”

It’s true that juggling so many things can be stressful. And I could get a lot better at managing my time (there’s plenty of apps for that). But the truth is, I like the juggling. I enjoy moving between worlds and the opportunities that offers for serendipitous connections and unexpected encounters.

“I’m learning to live with complexity,” my friend Arabella told me the other day. She also has a multifaceted life that includes two start-up businesses and various other commitments.

I’ve decided to follow her lead, to sit with the complexity, to “make friends with it” (the words an otologist once used when advising me how to manage my tinnitus). I definitely need to relinquish one or two commitments. But I’m never going to be that person driven by a single passion. In fact, lately I’ve come to realize that I like complexity in my life. It keeps things interesting. And it’s helped me to feel adventurous, interesting, attractive and anything but shy.