The Overleaf: 'When true simplicity is gained...'

"My Mama told me, 'Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.'"

This quote is from a movie, which I can say with confidence, is one of the best I have ever seen.

Forrest Gump is the tale of a boy who growing up was rather unfortunate. Below average academically, Forrest was rejected and bullied by the other children, all except one, a beautiful little girl named Jenny. Forrest goes through life being jeered at for being stupid, being ridiculed against for his innocent and simplicity and loses the majority of the people that he loves due to tragic circumstances. Despite all of this Forrest maintains his beautifully innocent outlook regarding love and never lets the people who discriminate against him break his confidence. The tragic events which occur in Forrest's life are just that, tragic, but also he is surrounded by beauty. He witnesses some of the most prestigious moments in history and performs extremely admirable acts and maintains his humility, saved by the buffer zone which is his innocence.

Watching this movie I felt inspired, since the beginning of time the foundation of brilliance and discovery has been based in thought.

The age of the roman empire saw the emergence of some of the most incredible minds, followed by the age of enlightenment, the renaissance, the age of exploration, the era of shakespear, byron, keats and shelley, when intelligence was a sign on power and the deeper you were and the more you thought the higher your status within society.

However seeing how the character of Forrest, in the movie, dealt with grief, with loss, with the tragic and the euphoric I began to wonder if we have just been kidding ourselves all along, perhaps the true beauty of life lies within the things which require no thought at all.

Things as simple as feeling the summer breeze brush against your skin, seeing the leaves of the trees change from season to season, falling in love, sharing your life with the people whom you care for most, enjoying the simplest things in life and never taking anything for granted, and above all, never thinking about where these miracles of life come from.

Many of us study in university and spend three or four or five years of our lives, in my case, analysing our history and trying to understand it, or theorising the poetry, drama and texts of the greatest literary minds which ever lived. What if Shakespeare just wrote for the sake of writing, what if history is a complete falsification of events and the world has always been just as it is, what if?

The complexity of life can be damaging, we take many things far to seriously and much of the pain, both emotional and physical, which we experience is caused by ourselves and our over developed ability to think. Would life be simpler if we were like Forrest Gump and just took life as it came?

Has innocence become a thing of the past?

Has it been replaced by over thinking and cynicism?

I hope not because I am of the opinion that the true beauty of life lies within the simplicity and beauty of an innocent mind.

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

Oscar Wild in 'A picture of Dorian Gray'