Bo-Bo Knows We've Lost Bo

Mike and I lost Bo this morning. Not all at once, of course. It's been a long and brutal farewell. But it's finally official. Bo's gone, gone, gone.

As of this morning's post Thanksgiving weigh-in, my husband and I have lost the equivalent of the heft of our sometimes sulky greyhound, Bo. Today Mike and I officially passed the 75-pound mark. Next stop? 100. Then 125 after that.

Any of our skinny friends out there weigh a buck and a quarter? I find it oddly inspiring to think of the weight left to be lost as a person person instead of a disembodied number.

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.