Awe of the Simple

There is awe of the simple and how great a message it can send. My first year at BYU, I took a class called "This I Believe." In the 1950's this was a radio program made up of personal essays written by the people, performed by the people, and heard by the people. A This I Believe essay has to be less than 500 words or three minutes when reading, that specifies a strong core belief through a personal experience. Also, it almost always uses the first person narrative and a personal tone. National Public Radio (NPR) resurrected this idea and now has a program called The Bob Edwards Show. Also, they have compiled and published several books with these essays. In Wayne Coyne’s essay, “Creating Our Own Happiness,” he concentrates on a simple moment of his life which brought awe to him and how that moment influenced (or revealed) what a strong belief of his.


Wayne begins his essay with this:  

“I was sitting in my car at a stoplight intersection listening to the radio. I was, I guess, lost in the moment, thinking how happy I was to be inside my nice warm car. It was cold and windy outside, and I thought, “Life is good.”

Now this was a long light. As I waited, I noticed two people huddled together at the bus stop. To my eyes, they looked uncomfortable; they looked cold and they looked poor. Their coats looked like they came from a thrift store. They weren’t wearing stuff from The Gap. I knew it because I’d been there.”

He focuses on the everyday experience. Wayne is sitting at a stoplight. It is not an overdramatic experience. Yet Wayne uses this experience - this small and simple moment in his life - to demonstrate his belief in happiness.

The form of the This I Believe essay emphasizes this awe of the simple. The essay in itself is limited - less than 500 words. It is meant to exist on a radio program. It calls for personal experiences and important self-reflective topics. There is no room to go into detail or elaborate very much. The best essays are simple. They focus on simple experiences. Yet they are powerful in their messages.

This reminded me of Cara’s project about memoirs in that This I Believe essays are almost always autobiographical in a different and emotional form that allows a connection between the reader and the author.

It also reminds me of Tara’s project in that a lot of these This I Believe essays talk about the impact of literature on the author - of how literature has changed what they believe. There are lots of essays about this at the website. It’d be interesting to look at the personal experiences and the influence of literature and the love of literature.

Read Wayne Coyne’s essay "Creating Our Own Happiness"

And if you’re interested, you can read the essay that I submitted to the website: just me and the piano.