Why Less Is More
Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi. 1617.
Suzanne Stabile December 2, 2025
Each year, my husband and I set aside time for a spiritual retreat, just the two of us. We spend so much time with others that if we are not aware and mindful, our personality as a couple has as much ego as we do as individuals. We have two goals on these trips. The first is to be settled and quiet long enough to perhaps hear something new. The second, is to have the time and space to discuss how we are each challenged by the chosen retreat topic and how we might respond.
A meaningful response will always require allowing something old to fall away, yet it seems to be harder than it should to know what to keep and what we no longer need. A winter coat, an old idea, a belief that hasn’t been examined since childhood, ways of being that no longer fit who we’re becoming or the stationary bicycle that represents so much potential. Choices that offer comfort but not value to the journey are tricky, because our attachment to what is familiar seems more alluring than the curiosity that a well-planned retreat would surely create.
The retreat and materials that we return to most often is titled “the Spirituality of Subtraction.” It was designed for us by Father Richard Rohr some fifteen years ago and every time we choose to revisit it, we are challenged to look at our lives in new ways. Like so many, we continue to struggle with the concept that less is more in a culture where more of something, anything, is often top of mind.
Our first encounter with this was on a journey to a parish in San Antonio to spend a few days for a private retreat. San Antonio is about two-hundred and seventy-five miles from Dallas. We had done that drive enough times to know the best places to stop, eat, rest or shop along the way. As we reached the outskirts of Dallas, Joe put in the cassette tape that Father Rohr had supplied and we began to listen to his opening talk about the spirituality of subtraction. After about an hour and a half, I pressed pause and asked if we could stop at the outlet kitchen store on the way. Joe had a look that I had seen many times before and it was the backdrop for his response; “ What do we need for the kitchen?”
“I’d like to get one of those wide mouth toasters.”
Joe replied that he really liked our toaster and wondered why we needed a wide mouth toaster.
“Well,” I explained, “you can toast bagels in them and we can’t in ours.”
“But we don’t eat bagels.”
Smiling, though perturbed, I said, “That’s because we don’t have a wide mouth toaster.”
The conversation ended as, we were almost to the exit so Joe suggested we just wait until we got back in the car to continue listening to the teaching from Father Rohr.
We found the toaster,secured it in its seemingly very large box in the back of the car, and headed again to San Antonio. Just as Joe pulled onto the Interstate, he pushed play on the tape and with God as our witness, the first words we heard from Father Rohr were, “You know … it’s like all of those people who think they need to go out and buy a wide mouth toaster when there is absolutely nothing wrong with the toaster they already have.”
There are no words to adequately describe the satisfaction that covered Joe’s face, and obviously he didn’t feel the need to say anything. With very few choices left, I picked up my journal, looked out the window for a time, and began taking notes as we continued to listen to “The Spirituality of Subtraction.”
“It seems that one cannot solve a problem with the same mixed-up thinking that created it.”
We had a very meaningful and memorable retreat, and were blessed in ways that we could not have imagined. We learned so much, committed to a lot of change, believed in ourselves and in one another and looked forward to what would be. It gave us the questions we would need to ask ourselves repeatedly in the years to come about our understanding of the differences between satisfaction and enough, needing and wanting, giving and keeping, and other equally challenging contradictions.
Albert Einstein said:
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”
It seems that one cannot solve a problem with the same mixed-up thinking that created it. So, I have asked more than once, “What good does it do to try to simplify your life by arranging, moving, charting, calendaring, giving and grasping, simplifying one part of life only to find that it complicates another?”
Parker Palmer had helpful wisdom when he said, “If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences.”
For simplicity to be real, lasting, true and effective it will have to come from a place of organic reality. This work of simplifying our lives has to become integral to our nature or it is a futile effort and wasted time. Instead, we must find a way to be both practical and spiritual in our attempts to simplify.
So, what keeps us from making the changes we desire? One reality that we’ve identified in our own lives is what Mary O’Malley identifies as compulsions. She says, “By compulsion I mean engaging in any recurring activity to manage our feelings, an activity that eventually ends up managing us.”
We can be compulsive in many ways: overspending, overeating, over working, over planning, over worrying, over exercising, over drinking, over computerizing, just overing. Many of us are compulsive without even knowing it but can be reminded of it when the computer crashes, the electricity is out for a time, the doctor says we must change our diet, a friend wonders if we are drinking too much. In those times it becomes clear just how much a particular activity controls our lives.
Our compulsion is to struggle. We live in a story in our heads that is always trying to get us to “do life,” telling us we need to make ourselves and our lives better or different from what they are. That is the core of the mess! Father Rohr says, “If you have to have more and more of the same thing, it isn’t working!”
So, moving forward …
Do we live our way into a new way of thinking?
Or do we think our way into a new way of living?
Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.
