! The Simple Person

and when you’re a child, you learn so much of ‘grown-up’ life, of ‘grown-up’ values – by the tone of voice in which they say things my mother, saying of a particular person whom I’d never met – or if I had, would not have known what to make of them – ‘She’s a simple person’ and the tone of voice with which she said this was full of compassion, without a touch of criticism: it meant, she has no mind with which to make complexity. Not a hint there of some label like mentally challenged, or mentally under-privileged; rather, the purity of a soul untrammelled; indeed, a state of grace for in her day, the honourable poor looked after, were at one with their simpler kin; while free to honour the skilled and fortunate and I listening, wondered if I could rise to life’s challenges as a simple person.