Simplicity & Complexity

It reasonable to think that everything is either simple or complex without any in-between but what about the subtle complexities in simplicity or the simplicities in complexity, there’s such beauty when that happens. Reasoning can be void or replenished when we find similarities and distinctions in both. To further employ lines on crowded foreheads with convoluted thoughts and mirky wordplays, the things which are believed to be simple are not so, they carry the complexity to help us understand them in simple ways, hence our brains simply deduct that it is simple.

In that elegant tangle, lies the rhythm of perception—the push and pull between chaos and order. The seemingly simple breath, the rise and fall of the chest, holds within it a symphony of cellular coordination, neurological orchestration, and evolutionary marvel. Simplicity, then, is not the absence of complexity, but its most articulate mask.

One the other hand, what we call complex might merely be a language we have not yet learned to simplify. Like staring at a star map without knowing the constellations—just dots until a myth is woven through them. Once meaning threads those points together, the impossible becomes intimate, and the infinite becomes readable.

So perhaps the division isn't in the thing itself, but in the lens. The same object—be it an idea, a feeling, a structure—shifts its form depending on the sharpness of our attention or the softness of our wonder.

Like a child’s view—where wonder shows up in the same places adults tend to see problems or weight.

And so, the lens—our mind's eye, really—isn’t fixed. It breathes. It evolves. It gets cloudy with certainty and clears with curiosity. Sometimes, it squints too hard, dissecting meaning with surgical precision until nothing feels alive anymore. Other times, it opens wide, lets everything in, and suddenly a mess becomes a masterpiece. The art lies in knowing when to look closer and when to simply let things be.

A raindrop on a windowpane can be just water—or it can be the whole sky holding its breath. A heartbeat can be reduced to a pulse or elevated to a poem. The choice is ours, though we rarely realize we're even making it. This is the dance: not between simple and complex, but between presence and perception. The act of witnessing gives shape to what is witnessed.

In this light, maybe we don’t actually uncover truth—we co-create it. With every mental framework, every metaphor, every borrowed bit of language, we build bridges across the unknown. Complexity and simplicity become twin currents, not opposing forces, but part of the same flow—like bass and treble in a song that only makes sense when heard whole.

And maybe that’s why the most profound truths feel like déjà vu. Not because we’ve heard them before, but because they echo something the soul already knows. They hum in a frequency beneath logic, where feeling and understanding hold hands quietly.

So, the next time we call something simple, we might do well to listen closer. And when something appears complex, we could try softening our gaze. Because in that in-between—where clarity kisses confusion—is where wonder waits.