Programming is a broad and deep field, however; getting your foot in the door shouldn't be intimidating.
Programming is the act of telling a computer how to do things. This covers a lot. Games, word processors, all of the hot new "apps" - any program that runs on your computer was brought to life with programming.
Programming often boils down to 3 basic steps: taking data in, manipulating it, and putting data back out. Understanding these 3 steps will allow you to create all sorts of interesting programs. Taking data in, or managing inputs, can involve handling key presses, text, or arbitrary data. The outputs, or things you put back out, can be text that you read, pretty (or not so pretty) graphics, or more data in any shape or size. In between these two steps, you can do almost anything imaginable to the data.
I hope to use the programming language Python to show you the simplicity of programming. Programming can be broken down into building blocks that anyone can understand with a bit of explanation and practice. The trick lies in realizing that even complicated problems can be expressed with these basic building blocks. Once you've mastered the basics, you can explore the other tools programming languages provide that exist to let you express and solve problems in simpler, faster, or more beautiful ways.