The Delight of Simplicity (#41)

One night, my six year old daughter was playing with a wooden tower toy that had a ramp for little cars to roll down. Though she couldn’t find the cars, she did find a handful of dice and discovered that they slid down the ramp in a satisfying way.

Trouble soon came in the form of her four year old brother, who wanted to play too. They were soon squabbling quite loudly over who had how many dice and who took whose dice from whom. The chaos was rather aggravating and I promptly took away all of the dice except one for each of them and braced myself for the protests that were sure to follow.

But they never came. The change was like a light switch – all they really needed was just one each and the room was suddenly filled with giggles and squeals of delight as they took turns with the toy.

Not all of our family squabbles end so easily, but it was a great illustration for me of the beauty and delight of simplicity.