However mean your life is, meet it and live it
Words of wisdom from Thoreau.
You may be familiar with the following quote from Thoreau.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It encourages us to embrace life and its realities which we may find contains some treasure.
There is beauty even in hardship, although we often find fault in life. We focus on negatives.
Thoreau reminds us we should live deliberately and consciously as it helps us appreciate the richness of the life we already possess.
What Thoreau meant
Thoreau urges readers to confront life directly rather than avoiding or complaining about it. Embrace life as it is and not how you wish it to be. This is good advice generally.
It is more difficult to accomplish today in a sense as we have so many examples of other lives we could live. Social media, television, lifestyles of the rich and famous.
We are reminded daily there is much that we seem to lack. Sports cars, fancy houses, yachts. All that glitz is elsewhere making our own lives seem poorer.
Thoreau disagrees. There are riches to be had right here where we already are.
A distorted world
Thoreau argues life isn’t inherently bad. Our negative outlook distorts our perception, making it seem poorer when we are materially wealthy.
Modern life makes this worse than in Thoreau’s day. We increasingly live through screens. Real life is pushed away for the safer sanitized version that comes with theme music and slick edits to minimize boredom.
This is a life mediated through a barrier that distances normality from our everyday experience making it seem optional.
Fakery defines us. Much is fantasy, including the perception of our own life. We focus on what we lack; this drives most advertising, the artificially induced yearning for things we don’t need. It takes effort to escape.
Find the joy
Thoreau asks us to find the joy in life. Happiness and wonder are available to most in some form.
Anyone can enjoy a sunset or the power of nature as we watch snow melt.
Even the meanest life has its moments. And most of us don’t live mean lives at all. Compared to our own grandparents we live like kings and queens.
If we look hard we can find beauty and joy.
Thoreau talks of the glory of the setting sun even when your circumstances leave a lot to be desired.
What an attitude to cultivate, what a way to live. It uses gratitude as a means to recalibrate what we see around us.
The end result must surely be a more intense experience. Less jaded. A life not spent chasing what we don’t have and appreciating what we do.
Self-reliance and simple living
Perhaps the antidote to our own dislocation is Thoreau’s philosophy from an era long before distractions overtook our lives. Turn away from the artificial saturation of devices and screens and soak up real life with its sunsets, its snow and rain, its seasons and its unpredictability.
In his writings Thoreau emphasized self-reliance and the importance of simple living. Today we seem to live very complex lives by comparison. All our amazing technology seems to enslave us.
Unlike today, and our obsession with materialism, he shunned the notion of wealth as the route to a good life and focused instead on direct engagement with the world and what it had to offer.
Making more of personal experience seems especially relevant now with young people on the cusp of turning away from the always-on digital landscape they inherited. The lure of the analogue world was perhaps inevitable for those who were shielded from it and may yet turn things around for the human race.
Simple pleasures
Thoreau emphasized living simply. In the quote above he takes it further and asks us to extract more from the life we already have.
By necessity this means avoiding the endless cycle of ever more consumption that defines us today. But it is more than rejecting a negative. It is conjuring the positive from everyday living.
He suggests we need to tap into a source of richness that is all around us but drowned out by a consumerist frenzy, much of it channelled through voluntary immersion in fake worlds using technology.
Instead we should focus on the real; a striking sunset, embracing a moment, reflecting on what we have, not what we lack.
It is a powerful way to live, a defence perhaps against the digital assault most of us struggle to escape.
Nature’s bounty shines equally on the poor and rich. Thoreau wants us to live deliberately, appreciating simple moments and finding joy in experience, not possessions. Surely a philosophy we can all embrace.
Great writing, Spiff. All joy (like all experiences) is within us. We can choose to be envious, greedy, or violent. Or we can go "inside" and appreciate the life that God has give us.
Namaste.
Yeah, we should focus on what's real. In every sense. I believe reality isn't just about the things we can see, touch, or measure, but also about our identity, who we are, and why we do what we do. Great post.