Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 267-281)

The bare necessities of life are way barer than we think they are.

All we really need, Thoreau says, are food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Maybe a few tools and books, but then again maybe not. Anything beyond these basics—even just too much of these basics—is a luxury, and luxuries get in the way of a simple, independent living. If you're happy, fine, he says. But if you're unhappy—if you think that life is hard, hard, hard—then stripping away the distractions might turn the tide of of your discontent.

The Thoreau chestnuts gleaned from today's excerpt:

• LIVE IN THE NOW by standing "on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment" (pp 272).
  

• BEAR WITNESS to the unsung miracles that are impossible to ignore and yet taken for granted by that mass of discontented men—why stay in bed when there are sunrises to be breathed in?
  

• CONSIDER THE TRUE REWARDS. "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward" ( p 273).

Any writers out there hearing that last one loud and clear? He goes on to tell the story of an Indian—Thoreau's word, not mine—who decided to make his living weaving baskets only to discover to his shock that the villagers had zippo interest in buying. The solution seems like a dismal choice: either squander energy convincing the world that we've just made what they never knew they always wanted or—can I get a collective shudder from the writer's out there?—make the goods we think will please others.

"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them," Thoreau says. "Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."

For those of us who hobble together professional life support for our creative body of work, our progress on that work is the antidote to the sacrifices we make so we don't have to suffer traditional 9-to-5 jobs. But what if we could cut a little deeper and need that professional life support a little less? What if we could all pare back to the simple necessaries of life and log our own hours in the woods of our own design?

The call to Walden, then, isn't about reporting to a cabin on a pond at the outskirts of Concord, but about reporting to the call we hear to our own endeavors—a call to create each our own private Waldens in the lives we're living now. Lately, there have been a rash of books published about experiential living— the guy lived a year following every Biblical rule it was possible to follow; the gal who outran her demons by globetrotting for a year. I totally get the impulse to be better, to be disciplined, to strike out on an adventure. But I'm not convinced that being better or disciplined or adventurous can't start where we are now with a simple, simple shift in our thinking.

But maybe that's just as naive as thinking the answer is in taking to the woods as a hermit for a couple years.

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

Jobs are for hosers.

That's the clear takeaway in the opening pages to the "Economy" section of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. After introducing the concept of his experiment and inviting readers to take away the principles that suit them best, Thoreau points his authorial finger at his readers and warns that they're killing themselves in pursuit of society's bullshit expectations of the shape of well-lived lives:

"[You're] making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day" (p. 262).

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation" (p 263).

"It appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living, because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose slear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof" (p. 264).

But all this striving, striving, striving is nothing but a collective nightmare that Thoreau's desperately trying to wake us up to escape. The messages in this opening, then, are clear: Draw your own conclusions, and direct the course of your life through deliberate choices:

"What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate" (p 263).

"We are made to exaggerate he importance of what work we do; and yethos much is not done by us! ... So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center" (p. 267).

Bo-Bo Knows Suburban Walden

So I've never actually read Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" from start to finish. Excerpts in high school, sure. Different excerpts in college, OK. But mostly I'm guilty of

1. falling for the seduction of the merchandising that's sprung up around Thoreau's soundbites (don't the mass of men own magnets rah-rah-rahing them to advance confidently in the direction of their dreams?¹) and
   
   
   
2. constructing an opinion of the man and his plan based on an idyllic portrait cobbled together from my dip-in-and-out acquaintance.

In spite of my spotty Thoreau scholarship, lately I've been thinking that the world wouldn't be such a bad place if people took a page from Thoreau and lived more deliberately. I'm not saying that we should all trek out to the nearest pond and set up camp for the next two years and two months. Just that if we adopted even a handful of Thoreau's tips for living, we might all have a little more peace. Maybe even a collective utopia built upon the sum of a million suburban Waldens created not by dropping out of society but by living the lives we intend within the fabric of our existing day to day whirlywoo. ²

Big thoughts given that I've never read the book from cover to cover. Ever. So I will. This month. Right here. Scholarship be damned. Each day I'll read a chunk of pages and figure out what they're saying to me.

I'm guessing Thoreau would approve. At the end of the second paragraph of the book, he writes of his hope that his readers "will accept such portions as apply to them." I read that as the author himself clearing the world for a buffet-style approach to "Walden."

If you want to join me in my little Suburban Walden project, I'll be reading from "The Portable Thoreau" pictured above. So read along. Comment. Please. Because if nobody joins the conversation, it'll be me yammering on about what I think, what I feel, what I, I, I...

Forgive me.

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."³

SUBURBAN WALDEN ENTRIES

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 268-281)



¹ This is a mangling of two quotes we'll get to in time, I promise.

² Or maybe I'm just enjoying an extra helping of delusions to complement my annual late-fall re-evaluation of the state of my union.

³ Page 252.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Losing Scratch Tickets

I buy a scratch ticket maybe once every three years, so you know it was a bad day when, exhausted, I convinced myself that the answer to all my problems lay behind a silver film I could scratch away with a quarter. Surely, the fates would be kind to the woman who believed—even for a second— that the urge to buy a ticket was a clear sign that freedom could be bought for the price of a garishly colored dream.

Alas, no.

But I've decided this is a good thing. Because as Emily Dickinson once said in her halting nineteenth century way: "success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed." Never mind how much that line reads like the sour grapes of a hermit woman who spent her life pushing society away. Because really, where's the sport in scratching your way to a brighter tomorrow? Had I won that million-dollar prize, I'd have been elated, sure. But what would that have taught me? A winning card might bring me a fortune, but my loser card gives me a chance to become the kind of scrappy person who doesn't need a stinking scratch ticket.

So screw you, Massachusetts State Lottery! Screw you, mom in Stoneham who scratched off a $10 million prize at Fast Freddies in Wakefield last week. Money? That's nothing. The real prize is the epiphany that comes from banging your head against the grind until a new solution presents itself. You know. Teach man a fish and all that happy horse shit.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Old Wisdom

Long before Nike slapped their just-do-it slogan on billboards and buses, some of the world's best thinkers were teaching that true happiness lies in yanking our thumbs out of our asses and taking action. Loosely translated, of course.

Today I'm grateful for the philosophical cheerleading squad that reminds me that there's no substitute for sweat. Hopefully my favorite quotes will inspire you as much as they do me:

"An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea."
- Buddha

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

"Advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and you will have success unimagined in common hours."
- Henry David Thoreau

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- Goethe¹

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Just do it" sounds so vulgar by comparison, doesn't it?

¹ OK, technically nobody said this exactly as it's written, but it gets attributed to Goethe on quote magnets, so that's good enough for me!

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Vicarious Vacation Bliss

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this gratitude thing, I go and bury my thankfulness beneath the rubble of some seriously ungrateful griping. Today it was about feeling worn down to the nubs but somehow not quite full-on sick.¹ About how green it makes me that, as of 7 p.m., my husband's officially on vacation until November 30. About the shitstorm I have to get through before I can take my (much shorter) Thanksgiving break with him next week.

But in the aisles of our local Stop & Shop tonight², the radio launched into the Chaka Khan version of "I'm Every Woman" and Mike busted into an impromptu dance down the length of the natural food aisle: Get-out-of-jail-free giddiness? Legs jerking like they're in a conga line? Fists drumming the air like he just don't care? Impassioned falsetto sing-a-long? Check, check, check, and check.

It's hard to stay grumpy when someone's bliss has bubbled over into dancing-in-the-supermarket abandon. And while vicarious bliss isn't quite as sweet as actual bliss, it's something to hold onto on a swamptastic day. I may have spent most of today feeling ungrateful and grumpy, but I'm choosing to end the day grateful that my husband's vacation high spreads faster than the swine flu among runny-nosed toddlers. It's all in me, baby. It's all in me!

¹I absolutely credit this to my dramatically improved nutrition of late.

²We've found that if you can stand shopping amongst weirdos, closing time on Friday is the easiest time to navigate the grocery store.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Grub Street

After the initial shock of the September 11^th attacks wore off—once it became clear that the nuclear bombs I'd been bracing for weren't imminent—it became even more clear that my well-intended plan to satisfy my urge to write with a career in journalism was absolutely cock-eyed.

I wish I could say that 9/11 had stirred my inner heroine. That I'd been called to enlist or become a firefighter or paramedic or grief counselor. But the only calling I felt was the same old call to write fiction that I'd been ignoring for years. It was time to write for me— not just a paycheck. So I bought a notebook and started what would turn out to be failed novel number¹, but my problems were bigger than a second failed book: the journalism skills that helped me tell true stories were letting my fiction fall flat.

Enter Grub Street, the Boston-based non-profit creative writing center extraordinaire.²

By December, 2001 I was scribbling away in a beginning fiction class at Grub Street.³ That first class gave me the most precious of gifts: access to a community where like-minded individuals didn't need me to explain why the writing itch I felt went deeper than journalism's ability to scratch.

At Grub Street, I was welcomed as a writer as long as I showed up willing to learn. And that welcome took the form of established writers who had clear memories of what it felt to be just starting out, peers who knew what POV⁴ stands for, seminars on topics I wanted to wade around in for an evening and workshops on topics I wanted to immerse myself in for weeks, opportunities to read my work and hear others read theirs, encouragement, commiseration, and a safe place to take risks, build confidence, foster friendships, and line myself up for the all-important, if occasional, kick in the ass.

Last night I met with a couple of Grub-Street novelists to swap scenes from our novels-in-progress, chat about what's working and what still needs work, and just generally refill the well that drains down to nothing by unchecked solo-time spent blinking at my computer screen. I walked away feeling jazzed—for their books, for mine, and for the process in general.

For the most part, the non-writing world only recognizes writers once they've got an Amazon sales rank. But Grub Street recognizes writers in the fast-talking breathless ways we speak when talk turns to writing, in the beautiful turns of phrases that shine like daffodils among our beginner dandelion sentences, and in our Herculean ability to nurture a willingness to stick to the page in the face of long, long odds.

For the guidance, friendships, and all the ways leading to ways⁵ I can trace back to finding my own way into that first Grub Street class almost eight years ago, I'm more grateful than I have words to describe. Maybe some Grub Street someone will help me with that, too.


¹ Out of four failed novels. Five times is hopefully the charm...novel number five is the only one that graduated to revision stage, so it's already more successful than all the others combined.

²I think it's only fair to disclose that I'm an ambassador at Grub Street. Though I want to be clear: I'm not writing this piece because I'm an ambassador, but I'd bet I got tapped to become an ambassador because I love Grub enough to think to write a piece like this.

³Novelist Lisa Borders was at the helm. I couldn't have asked for a friendlier, more doggedly enthusiastic first face of Grub.

⁴Point of view.

⁵With apologies to Robert Frost.