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Living Deliberately in 2020
Years later, Walden still shows the importance of disconnecting from a connected world…
“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.”
So writes Henry David Thoreau in Walden, an 1854 novel depicting the author’s time of solace and self-exploration in the woods of Massachusetts. Thoreau lived alone for over two years, relying solely on his own labor to survive.
In Thoreau’s words, “Most men…through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” A modern translation: we become so obsessed with the minutia of life that we fail to see the big picture.
If, in 1854, this was something that Thoreau worried about, how worried would he be today?
We live in a society that is practically inescapable. From the second we wake up to the second we fall asleep, we are inundated with text messages, emails, phone calls, and notifications. It’s overwhelming, to say the least. And because it’s so overwhelming, we risk losing the distinction between what is a precious moment of life and what is distracting.
