We’ve been talking about the concept of simplicity around Broadway in the last week or so. Its a theme we’re using for our Lenten experience this year and we’re using Donna Schaper’s book, Living Well While Doing Good as a jumping off point for our discussion.

The paradox of living simply in today’s complicated world hit me square in the face yesterday (and lingers still today.) For weeks, nay, months I have been trying to find a simple way to syncronize my old telephone list from my last mobile phone, an LG EnV, into my Blackberry Curve that I purchased months ago. I wanted a sync program that I could use a computer keyboard to either key in, or better yet do a direct hot sync. I bought the Blackberry because I wanted a phone that could keep and sync calendar dates so that I could change my calendar either at my computer or with my phone if I was away from my desk. On this latter task, I had my share of challenges. The reason is that I had recently switched from a PC based laptop to a macbook. So finding a mac sync program that would communicate blackberry to OS that WORKED proved difficult. The first freebie program I downloaded didn’t work at all and all the chat threads confirmed this. I tried a second one that folks on the chat threads said worked for them (I paid 29 bucks for it too!) It worked partially…sometimes it would sync and sometimes not. My calendar and notes would sync, my contacts wouldn’t…I would get wierd messages of codes giving reasons why and I had no idea what code 3.AA27 meant! And so I sort of stopped trying to make it work and dealt with the chaos for a while.

One day an advertisment (probably facebook) popped up for Google to Blackberry sync and I thought “hey! I’ll try it.” IT WORKED! Like a charm! I was ecstatic. I had kept a Google calendar in the past, but had switched to using i-cal when getting the macbook. Then I tried the Google to i-cal sync. Worked again! Heeyyyyyy, this is sweeeeett…

OK, so I’m humming along syncing my calendars, Blackerry, i-cal, Google…they’re all talkin’ the same language…at least as far as I was concerned.

Then I went too far. Remember I wanted to sync my contacts? So, I noticed that if I set up a Google gmail account, I could put my contacts online and sync with all my devices. It worked with the calendar, I thought, why not?

So I went ahead and set up a gmail account. I noticed, however, that it automatically put my primary email address as secondary to my gmail. I was concerned that it would complicate receiving my emails through the path to my computer’s inbox in the regular way and I got cold feet. I changed my my and decided to deactivate the gmail account. Big Mistake! By deactivating that new account I (evidently) deactivated the now secondary account and my Google calendar, with it! It was GONE! Dentist appointments, staff meetings, reminders to make calls… all gone!

I am thankful for redundancy. The appointments remained on the Blackberry and I have been reinstalling them by hand on to a newly set up Google calendar account and in the end, it turns out I would have been better off just doing it by hand to begin with.

Here’s the part where I should talk about simplicity. But do I need to say more? I mean, really! How much more complicated can our lives become? We are surrounded by technology that is supposed to make our lives easier but we’re busier than ever. We take our children to enrichment activities to make their lives better, but their schedules are so filled with stuff that they get tired cranky and miserable.  Our own schedules are so cram packed with work, family activities, and social commitments that we are often too exhausted to appreciate the reason why we do them.

Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I don’t think I am.  I’m hoping that I will learn something from Donna Schaper.  She’s a pretty common sense person.  I need some tips on when to say to myself “are you investing too much time into this?” or “is this really something that you need to be doing? I need to do a better job of keeping it simple.  I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing.