Back in my outside catering days, I always used to like a challenge. Either Id contract to produce dishes that were technically difficult for the numbers involved, or else Id agree to something when I had no idea how I could possibly manage it.

I saw it as a way of constantly raising my game. It exercised my mind (gave me the odd nightmare) and meant that I was forever wresting success from the jaws of failure, arms plunged deep into great mounds of foodstuffs, the air blue with expletives.

Yet, in some ways the hardest thing I ever did was to produce devilled eggs for 120 people. Technically, it couldnt have been simpler: hard boil eggs, make filling, stuff eggs and serve.

In fact the sheer simplicity of it was the problem. You can use complexity both to mask flaws and as a means of evading issues.

The thing about the eggs was this: they were either right or they were wrong; the shell either came off neatly or the whites looked as if a rat had nibbled them; you either shaved a tiny layer off the rounded base of each half or they skeetered across plates with an alarming propensity to nose-dive onto the floor.

Life is like that. Its not easy, but it is simple; or at least it can be. Whats the difference, you might ask? The two words are often used more or less interchangeably, but their opposites are not synonyms. The opposite of easy is difficult, whereas the opposite of simple is complex.

We tend to assume that life is complex, but it doesnt have to be. It is always our response to life and, more specifically, the problems that confront us, that make for the difficulty.

Human beings are easily paralysed by indecision. We have the intellectual capacity to entertain various different thoughts and points of view about a single situation; and we do so more or less simultaneously. Sometimes these thoughts and points of view are not even our own. Theyve been programmed into us, at some point, by a Significant Other. Yet they can clamour so much louder than our own thoughts as to drown them out.

When this happens we waste enormous quantities of time and energy going round in ever decreasing circles before we arrive at a decision. Whats more, that decision may well be the thing we first thought of, but were discouraged from implementing by all the other thoughts and viewpoints that we gave headspace to.

Sharon, my little furry canine guru with the big brown eyes is rarely given to indecision. Generally she is a concrete thinker, who quickly weighs up a situation and proceeds to take appropriate action - except when things get truly complicated. As a puppy, when she occasionally visited my Alexander training school, extraordinary events would sometimes faze her.

The Alexander juggling sessions were particularly baffling for her as they would have been for any onlooker. In these sessions students threw juggling balls up into the air, and let them drop to the floor if the balls did not fall directly back down into their hands.

For Sharon it was most problematic. She would observe intently, start towards one ball, then hear another fall and another, until she did not know where to start. Not unlike most humans.

But Sharon has a small mouth and a quick spirit. She isnt given to what ifs and ah buts, so she would act on the two certainties she had: first, that she could only pick up one ball at a time and, second, that she stood to miss out all the way round if she did nothing.

Sharon was well aware of the pitfalls of inaction. Instead she would focus on one ball, swiftly move into action and visit the force of her small, furry personality on that ball.

How many humans are as quick to register that doing nothing can be just as harmful as doing something rash? And why does a quick decision have to be rash?

The point is; life becomes complicated and confusing when we try to chase a number of balls simultaneously. When we focus on one at a time, we stand the best chance of dealing with it effectively and then turning our attention to the next one.

Simplicity is opting for one course of action at any given time and following through.

When you do that, what happens to all the other problems clamouring for your attention? Strange to say, a lot of them seem either to fade away or to resolve themselves.

By opting for a single course of action you sweep away the fertile soil of uncertainty in which anxieties, doubts and problems proliferate. In other words, you simplify things down to manageable proportions.

You may not have it in your power to make life easy, but its well within your power to simplify it.

(C) 2005 Annie Kaszina