However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names…The fault-finder will find faults, even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.’ from Walden by Henry David Thoreau (American writer 1817-62)
(19.3.16)
I like this message that you should ‘love your life’ – even though I realise that such Pollyanna-type feel-goodery can easily be attacked. What? you might expostulate, is the man telling refugees suffering in the mud of Macedonia to ‘love’ their lives? How fatuous!
But Thoreau was a radical, and had plenty enough compassion for the poor. So he can’t be accused of not understanding that life for many people can be a real ordeal. I doubt very much that he saw poverty as romantic.
Yet he did believe that it could be good to strip yourself of all the trappings of a comfortable life and live very simply. That is why he built himself a simple cabin in Walden Woods, Massachusetts and went to live there alone in 1845. He wanted to focus on his writing and to test himself – as he explained:
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.’
By ‘mean’ and ‘meanness’ here, of course, he means, ‘poor.’ He wants to find out what it is like with live with very little, and to let people know the results of this experiment.
So to the quotation on this week’s column. Have you ever dreamed of living a simpler life? Of getting rid of possessions and seeing how little money you need to live? In reality, it is a very hard thing to do, especially for somebody as wedding to possessions as as I am! But the quote I have chosen is not so much about that, as about being contented. When Thoreau took him off to the cabin near Walden Ponds he was choosing to live what would not be called a ‘mindful’ life. And that is something within reach of all of us, well off and poor alike.
You and I know that there are those who will always moan about their lives. How dreary they are! Whatever they have, it is not enough. They bleat and whinge and feel sorry for themselves, and if (say) you were to point out that compared to the real poor they are very lucky indeed, they would probably get very angry. The truth is, often the complainers are extremely happy in their negativity; that is why they will always find something to make them discontented, yes even (as Thoreau says) if they were to find themselves in heaven. I mean, there’d be all those pesky angels wafting about looking holier than thou! What a pain!
For the rest of us, those who feel grateful to be alive, it is good to reminded to run towards your life and embrace it. Derek Walcott wrote a beautiful poem called ‘Love After Love’ which expresses this thought. It begins:
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror
And each will smile at the other’s welcome.
This wonderful, uplifting poem ends with the words, ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’ And it does not matter a fig whether you are on the minimum wage or pull in a goodly amount of dosh each month, for if you are the kind of person who greets the sun with delight and sees grey skies as pearly, not sad – then you have it in you to be happy.
So the next time you feel like having a moan about your life, stop and remember Thoreau and take back all those ‘hard names’ that might have spring to your lips. Love your life, even on those days when you feel a little broke, because even if it ‘aint perfect, it is infinitely precious and short – and your very own