How Difficult It Is To Be Simple?
A Saturday in the village where Van Gogh spent his last days
I have a simple rule when choosing what to read, watch, or listen to. Is it real? Is it inspired by something that actually happened? That one filter has shaped almost everything I consume. Books, documentaries, podcasts, films. If it happened to a real person, I’m in.
A few weeks ago I started reading a book called Attached. It answered several questions I had been sitting with for a long time. About how I love, why I feel things so deeply, why connection matters to me the way it does.
This Saturday, I took a train to a small village called Auvers-sur-Oise, about an hour north of Paris, to be somewhere, to be present.
It’s the place where Van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his life. In those 70 days he painted 74 paintings. One painting per day, roughly, while everything inside him was falling apart.
I am not a painter. I don’t know how to read a painting the way someone trained in art would. But standing in that village, the narrow streets, the fields that looked exactly like the ones in his paintings, the small room where he slept, something hit me that I didn’t expect.
I recognised him. Not the genius. Not the madness. Not the stories built around broken artists. The person underneath all of that.
A man who struggled with romantic relationships his entire life. Who could not make love stay no matter how hard he tried. Who poured everything he couldn’t say out loud into his work. Without stopping. Almost like he had no choice. As if painting was the only language that never failed him.
And through all of it, his brother Theo. Who wrote to him, showed up, believed in work the world had not yet noticed. And at the very end, when Van Gogh lay dying, Theo was there holding his hand.
I thought about my sister when I read this. She is that for me. The one who sends a message on the hardest days telling me I was built for something bigger. The one who gave me a blank diary and in doing so gave me a way to speak. Pure, steady love from one person. It can hold you together in ways nothing else can.
What moved me most was not Van Gogh’s talent. It was his refusal to stop.
He was in pain. He was lonely. And every morning he picked up a brush and went back to the fields. Not because things were fine. Because he had something to say and he was going to say it anyway.
Writing these blogs has become that for me. I have learned that I need somewhere to put what I feel. Writing is how I process, how I reach out, how I stay honest with myself about where I actually am.
This Saturday in Auvers was part of the same thing. Instead of staying inside with my thoughts, I went somewhere. I stood in the fields Van Gogh painted. I breathed cold air. I was present, even for a few hours, in something larger than my own head.
He left behind one line. Words his doctor said to him, that Van Gogh wrote down in a letter and clearly could not let go of either:
“How difficult it is to be simple.”
I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure he did either. But there is something quietly reassuring in knowing that one of the greatest artists who ever lived was also just a person carrying the same questions the rest of us carry.
That is why real stories reach me. Not because they have answers. Because they prove that someone else was in the room too.