“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” –from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, as are all italicized quotes throughout.
I once took one of those internet quizzes testing how high maintenance I was and got 0%. The quiz summary of that result began, “You seem to be a pretty boring person.” It is true- I am kind of boring. I don’t really enjoy small-talk or gossip and avoid drama. In fact, I get bored by others fussing over nonsense. I prefer for things to remain calm and serene. Simple things closely inspected are boring only when they are blatantly plagiarized or derivative; the rest is boring only to those who desire for things to be obvious. The feeling of boredom belongs to those lacking both imagination and drive; those complaining of being bored end up trying to entertain themselves with hackneyed imitation.
The majority in our society are addicted to external distraction. To fulfill that desire, we become obsessed with finding flaws, which are blamed for causing us stress, frustration and disappointment. Everybody wants to find the defect but nobody wants to be it, so taking responsibility without having a scapegoat is avoided. For every person who does something, there are a thousand proclaiming how it should have been done. People will do almost anything to not have to do almost anything- it boggles my mind that anyone would rather eat processed food than learn to cook. We remain inside our climate-regulated shelters, except for when we must quickly move to our climate-regulated vehicles to transport ourselves to another climate-regulated shelter, all the while discussing the weather with enthusiastic aplomb. When something goes awry with either shelter or transportation, we find another to fix it as quickly as possible, and complain about the expense. “The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.”
Our adeptness at being distracted causes us to accumulate a disproportionate number of aversions. We rile against absurdly mundane things like tall grass, weeds, displaced rocks, dirt patches, insects, rodents and dust. We act as if we would prefer to be sealed in a hyperbaric chamber were it not for the inability to fit our possessions into it. Symmetrical apples, matching plates and color-coordinated clothes are insisted upon while individuality, diversity and candor are ridiculed, condemned and shunned. “Our life is frittered away by detail.” The goal, it seems, is to keep the world as homogenous, regulated and saccharine as possible. Anything which catches our attention is considered offensive, and must be eliminated, with the implied goal that perhaps one day everything- and everyone- can be ignored. But that day will never come, simply because it would deny us the satisfaction of pointing at something and declaring, “That is why I suffer.”
Thoreau said, “My greatest skill has been to want but little.” He explored an alternative method for enabling us to have everything we want, which began by breaking things down to understand what we truly need and how those needs can be most efficiently procured. He then sought to fully appreciate the beauty in what those basic necessities provided, so that everything we could ever want could be found in having only what we need. ”I wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that are not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life to a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” Thoreau sussed out what was essential so that he could disregard the superfluous and explore that which was unencumbered, undiluted and undistracted in order to emulate and embody those traits. Instead of pursuing cosmetic blemishlessness, he aimed to do the right thing.
Mental or physical illness or disability, war and oppressive overlords inescapably complicate things by adding a variable to decisions that must be prioritized. A safe and healthy person, however, is free to choose from a vast number of options. The preferences of a healthy person are, too often, devoid of grounded intention and instead influenced by things like lethargy, mania, etiquette, custom or nostalgia. These whims are then presented so as to feign being the most logical choice. We look down upon those who fail to convincingly emulate and reflect the prevailing cultural customs while deriding all other customs as being ignorant and absurd. We distort the importance of tradition until it becomes more sacred than life itself.
We allow others to do not only our thinking but also our work for us, admiring our own cleverness in being able to reap the rewards of their labor without considering that we are robbing ourselves of opportunities to learn, improve and excel. We expect, depend upon and demand that there will always be someone around to help us, or that there will always be someone to work for and obey, because either way we have someone to blame for whatever fails to impress. While we could be spreading good deeds in private, we instead purchase extravagances that proclaim to all our ability to waste, because excess proves success. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.” We hope that others look upon our things with admiration while nervously trying to avoid their inevitable deterioration.
A dichotomy can be created between likes and dislikes so that we can see which outweighs the other.
Sometimes we like sleep more than we dislike being late. Sometimes we dislike doing dishes more than we like clean counters. Sometimes we dislike confrontation more than we like being honest. Sometimes we like surfing the internet more than we like reading or writing. Sometimes we dislike weeding more than we dislike weeds. Our values are revealed by our actions.
I, like most, find it much easier to complain than praise. To counter negativity, I endeavor to find one thing I can appreciate and then passionately learn about it, so that my focus remains on something constructive or positive. “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” When you are truly dedicated to improving at a craft, you won’t let anything distract you from it; there are no excuses. Success and failure are equal parts of the process. It is not the thing but rather our chosen reaction to it that dictates how we feel. “The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are indistinguishable.” Our chosen reactions shape our habitual, instinctual, immediate ones, and if we can learn to control those, we have conquered ourselves and become the rulers of our own existence.
My whole approach to living has been extremely influenced by the writings of Thoreau, whom I first learned about in second or third grade through a children’s book called My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, about a boy living alone in the wilderness. I have always been quite fond of being in nature. I highly value the ability to survive alone in the wild, and therefore appreciate anything relating to that task, including being independent, resourceful, durable, adaptable and long-suffering. These days, I get outdoors by playing a lot of disc golf, a sport in which players wander around in the woods and grass throwing over-engineered Frisbees around the trees. I like playing disc golf more than I dislike being tired, playing poorly or bugs. “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”
Happiness is not difficult to attain. I think a lot of people resist happiness because it’s, you know, boring. In America, we are taught that happiness is won through demonstrating dominance by acquiring assets, acceptance or obedience. Contentment and satisfaction are considered lazy. We want spectacle. We want war. We run through the forest, avoiding the trees, in hopes of finding the enchanted castle. What splendor, elegance, mystery or charm, pray tell, could any castle possibly have that surpasses that of a forest? The most opulent restaurant in the world cannot make food taste better than that which can be collected in the wild by a wandering nomad and cooked over an open fire pit. We are so well trained at wanting more that the concept of wanting nothing except to appreciate what we already have seems absurd. “Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
Nobody on their death bed reminisces about the day a slow driver in front of them that made them late for work. A lot of things that really annoy us just aren’t important at all, and yet we give them our utmost energy and attention. When we are able to step back and take the time to consider what is really important, we find now, the present, unfolding from the future and disappearing into the past, staring back. Only after letting go of distractions, annoyances and imperfections can we go about living the life that is in front of us. “When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.”
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