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Add to Favorites"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need." Vernon Howard
When my Mom passed away 10 years ago, a heart breaking responsibility fell on my shoulders: I had to sort through all her worldly possessions and decide what to keep and cherish, what to divide among friends and family, what to donate to charity, and what to simply throw away. Anyone would find this difficult, but for one with an artist's sensibilities, the anguish was acute. I have yet to complete my sorrowful obligation.
Still, through this painful process of letting go, I came to notice how many needless things we humans, all of us, unconsciously accumulate during the blessed journey of our sacred lives, and began to examine my own odd habits of clutching on to possessions that seem to possess me, hold me down, and overburden the gravitational stresses of my already cluttered world. It was then that I resolved to divest myself of everything I owned but didn't use or need. The goal I set myself was clear: when I died, anyone charged with cleaning up after me could simply scoop out the contents of a single closet and be done.
I think that's what Thoreau was after in his pursuit of simplicity - not that we shouldn't own things that were useful and enhanced our lives, but that we didn't need things that did not.
He lived his relatively short life during the early to mid 19th century, a simpler time than ours. Yet he felt a compelling desire to pare down his life to the basic elements of universal human need. He understood, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that appetite grows by what it feeds on - the want for more and more and more.
He built a cabin in the woods, on the land of a mentor and a friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He lived close enough to civilization and all its comforts, but just far enough away for him to think on things more deeply.
Predictably, in his time he had his critics. Some even mocked his approach to life as effeminate - like Arnold Schwarzenegger calling his opponents 'girly men' today. Yet shouldn't we all, at one time or another, crawl out of the bloody ring of fiercely competitive world pressures, and retire to a place of solitude and peace to find ourselves? What's wrong with that? As Aristotle so rightly observed, an unexamined life is not worth living.
There were some who recognized his work as genius. The 'less is more' crowd. They believed that being free of material possessions is an emancipation that allows one ultimately to be in possession of their souls, not bound to worldly things that are essentially inconsequential.
Stil l, there will always be those of us who believe that more is not enough - the Donald Trumps of the world, who consider their own offspring as nothing more than a 'brand extension', a way of expanding their need for greed across the world. Such people will always populate our time on earth.
So will our prophets. Leonardo Da Vinci - himself caught up in the whirl of the world at war and the pressure to be productive - once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
So I leave you with a few salient quotations that I take close to heart and treasure:
"When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." Lao Tzu
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Henry David Thoreau
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." Hans Hofmann
Learn more about this author, John Barden.
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No
In our age of excess, I'd say it's a fair bet many of us have been compelled to "simplify". The rat race gets frustrating, and the pressures of living in a city grow increasingly wearisome with mounting laws and regulations that effectively add to the cost of living.
Yet as inspirational a work as Walden is, it doesn't paint the whole picture. Critics point out that Thoreau would often head home for a meal, or walk into town. The life he led was more of a mendicant than of someone living a life of true simplicity. And the fact that he had access to the land in the first place is something we wouldn't see often today, at least in most parts of the country. A few years back, stuck without a car and with a rather large family to support I inquired of several church members to see if there was a car I could borrow. Even in that church community, not one would lend their car because of fear that it would affect their insurance rates.
The rural parts of the United States are too often playgrounds of the idle rich, and urban sprawl has led to communities being built out more than five miles from their center. Even if Thoreau were to find his "Walden", he would find it nearly impossible to get into town without some form of transportation, even if it were a bicycle. But as bicycles are not allowed on Interstates, this could confine him to state roads and rather long detours to his destination.
If he were in town, he would be arrested for failing to have the utilities on. Anything he erected on the property would be subject to building permits and environmental regulations. He couldn't fish without a license or hunt small game without the same. And if he tried to start a fire, he would need to check to see if a burn ban was in effect.
The idea of simplicity is a compelling, attractive one, but one that is increasingly impossible. One could very well argue that that was what Christopher McCandless was hoping to achieve when he walked into the Alaskan frontier in April 1992. For those not familiar with the story, McCandless's corpse was carried out that August. While it is arguable that McCandless might have survived had he been better prepared, the truth is the wilderness is far harsher than our idyllic dreams often depict it. While we might envision days of leisure, the truth is, our days would most likely be prepared with proactively working to ensure our continued survival. In McCandless' case, he was afforded shelter because of a bus that had been left there long before.
While there are things we can and should do to simplify our lifestyle, Walden pond has been paved to put up a parking lot (apologies to Joni Mitchell). If it ever was (and there are debates about that), it has long since been bulldozed to make way for a more modern "progressive" society.
Learn more about this author, Timothy Justice.
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