Sparks for You #4
Life-affirming wisdom from Thoreau.
This may sound morbid to some, but when I first read the following words from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, I knew that I wanted this quotation inscribed on my headstone when I die:
“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."
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Three life-affirming messages from this passage especially resonate with me:
(1) Live deliberately. Thinking, choosing, and acting carefully with intention every day is challenging but rewarding. Taking the reins in your hands rather than letting things happen to you is empowering and minimizes feelings of helpless frustration.
(2) Live according to what is essentially important. Stay focused on achieving your highest values. Don’t sweat the small stuff or get caught up in someone else’s agenda.
(3) Really live until you die. As Andy Dufresne says to Red in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” Sitting around and “waiting for your life to start” is a kind of slow death that leaves you with nothing but regret at the end of your days. Actualizing your intellectual, psychological, emotional, and biological capacities the best you can will enable you to pass the “deathbed test” and look back on it all with a smile.
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Your Shawshank quote echoes Bob Dylan’s ‘He not busy being born is busy dying.’ (It’s alright, Ma). Interesting categorisation of friends. I’ve survived on very few. It would be lovely to find a few more.
I know someone whose personal ritual is to read (passages from) Walden every year on July 4 in commemoration of Thoreau and his own commemoration of Independence Day. Perhaps a new life-affirming practice more of us could try?