Life Near the Bone

However mean your life is, meet it and live it. Love your life, poor as it is. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. Life nearest the bone is the sweetest. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When HD Throeau want to live beside Walden Pond, he pared his life down to what he considered its essentials. The physical possessions he took to his 10 x 15 cabin, the one he built largely from castoffs with his own hands, were a cane bed, his green writing desk, a small table, and three chairs. He didn't do this because he had to, but because he thought there was something he had to learn, something that could be learned no other way than to remove all the clutter and the noise it generated. 

We usually have no idea how much noise surrounds us. I went to Alaska once, in 1985, and experienced for the only time a life without noise. We drove out into the what seemed like the wilderness to us, though in Alaskan terms, it was just, well, just Alaska. But we pulled over in the middle of nowhere, literally more than a hundred miles from any man-built structure, shut off the car and listened. That day, for the first and only time, I could HEAR the wind. And on it, the whirr of insect wings. And nothing else. No engine. No human. No bird or rustling of any animal, although they surely were there. It was just the earth. The earth breathing.

I think Thoreau had a similar experience by his pond cabin. Completely alone in a place that declared the vitality of life all around him. And he chronicled it. The birds, the fish, the habits of plants, the beavers. He had visitors, to be sure, but left the distinct impression that they were far less interesting than the revelations nature provided. And the revelation that stuck was that the material things we hang on our lives are too easily mistaken for life itself. Life is best lived, he thought, without as many of them as we can manage. Even undisturbed cartons stored in a shed or a basement exert a silent claim on our lives, a claim of attention and awareness. They are just THERE. Thoreau wanted to evaluate their noise and, living in the woods, he did.

He eventually went back to what we call civilization, of course, but with a renewed attitude, one he wanted to share with us. Hence the book. I am in a place in life where I have a chance, another chance, to do something similar, to sell my clothes and other possessions, if you will, so that I can lay final claim to my thoughts. I am paring my life down to see whether I can find the bone of it and I'm encouraged by HD's happy ending.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Bravo, HD. I endeavor to similarly advance.

Image: The Reader's Thoreau