Simplicity

📍 Moda, Istanbul

There is a cool freshness to this Istanbul morning. The Turkish stay up very late, and subsequently sleep in, so now the streets are dead. The sky, which was bleak and grey and wet yesterday, fills-up early with a soft blue. The city murmurs gently, and as it began to stir I walked towards Moda’s eastern ferry terminal for no reason whatsoever; just early enough to enjoy the buildings wrapped-up in the gold dawn. The Bosphorus glittered; the gulls swooped, without a leaving a trace in the sky behind them; their wings almost clipping the walls of the little alleys the rushed up and down, as they twirl between the houses and the harbour.

Beneath them, the day’s first çay (tea) is poured, a couple drunkenly kiss and stumbled backwards, two greyed men rip apart bread to share, and a distorted overalled shadow — a cigarette hanging limp from his lower lip — grabs two bright blue bin-bags and hauls them into the back of his truck along with the quiet crunch of breaking glass. The sounds of the gulls echoed between us — strange early-morning figures, ignoring each other as if ghosts.

And now I’m in a cafe called Kuff. Now, in this quiet moment, one hundred yards away I can just about see the rusted metal door of the apartment block Monty (my bro) and I lived in when we first moved to Istanbul. To save money, we shared a bed, we sat on the terrace watching the sunsets with no clue about tomorrow, let alone 2026 (it was 2020). And now — in this stillness — I notice the cats sit on the windowsills, and on the pavement; on the backs of mopeds and on the car bonnets. Here’s a young cat — white body, black head and white nose, watching the gulls as if haunted, lifting his paws, twitching his tail, micro-movements with his ears.

Five years! All a blur. And so much bloody heartache, too. Hope, and excitement, and joy, and so little tangible to show for it. Just as those gulls above me don’t leave a trace on the sky, nor did I in those five or so years.

Becoming an invisible person in a new country always gives me a transcendental sense of calm and presence. I feel like the stories I get wrapped-up in become transparent and fall from my shoulders. I’ve been quite busy setting-up my life back in London, and and in the midst of all the frantic re-construction work, I read a story about Guru Nanak that touched my heart:

Guru Nanak visits a frontier town, and the first house he sees is the largest, and most opulent. The roof is with covered with flags. This particular house is the home of a Money Lender, who, every time he fills another box of money, he hoists another flag above his roof to celebrate, and flaunt his wealth to the town.

Guru Nanak goes to the door of the house and asks for the owner, who, always available new business, promptly appears.

“Could you do me one favour?”, Guru Nanak asks the Money Lender, “could you look after this rusty old pin for me, and promise to return it to me when we meet again in the next life?”.

Anticipating that a good deed will increase his credit rating in heaven, the Money Lender replies radiantly, with a smile, “Of course, and I won’t charge you a penny for its safekeeping!”

Guru Nanak nods and departs.

Later that day, the Money Lender explains his recent deal to his wife, saying with pride that he will go to heaven for looking after Guru Nanak’s rusty pin:

“It’s just an old pin,” explains the Money Lender to his wife, “I’ll return it when I see him again in the next life…”

“You idiot! You fool! That’s a promise you can’t keep!”, his wife interrupts, “you can’t take even this rusty old pin with you to the next life!”.

And with that, the Money Lender got down on his knees and became a disciple of Guru Nanak.

And, when I heard that story, I nearly fell to my knees .

What a teaching! And how it reverberated into my soul. It’s as if I’ve been feeling a little more like the Money Lender: collecting… gathering… hoarding my little responsibilities in my little kingdom — raising one flag after another, causally in conversation, casually at work — and spending less time sitting in that empty space of unknowing.

But when travelling (as I am now), I intentionally let go. It’s one of the reasons I find moving from place-to-place-to-place so liberating: movement forces un-cluttering.

I left books with strangers, forgot t-shirts hanging on Sri Lankan washing lines, reduced the complexity of my life to, basically, that of a pilgrim.

In the last few months, however, new responsibilities have been swarming like a cloud of bees, and the complexity of my life has grown — so the simplicity which I had created has begun to unwind.

As a result, I have hardly been making time for watching the steam rising from the çay, or for enjoying the cats’ purr, or for walking for the sake of walking.

Writing brings me back to the ever-present moment. It captures it, but beyond that if forces us to really look at a feeling or a view. It forced me to watch those sea gulls and notice how they twist and play. Time to waste is never wasted time: it’s experienced, lived, breathed, savoured. It’s unproductive and futile by ordinary standards, and because of that it’s especially delicious. To me, it’s life-extending because an hour of nothing feels like eternity — and who doesn’t want to live for eternity.

So how to retain the simplicity of life? On reflection, I think it’s easy: it’s living out the lesson that Guru Nanak taught to the Money Lender. Every aspect of life, right down the the rusty pins, the mosquitos, the sunsets, the new moons and even Southern Rail, will be washed away — obliterated. And your whole life (and mine) will leave as much of a mark as the gulls leave as they cross that wide Istanbul sky.