deliberate living.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” –Henry David Thoreau

Cars weave about one another. A fatal dance that is not overly appealing to the senses, unless adrenaline is a sense. The line at the pharmacy is irritatingly unending. All faces refuse to hide the disgust felt upon being inconvenienced. Trash outlines the trail next to the man-made body of water. To breathe in deep is to risk bodily contamination.

Yet the noise, the hurry, it becomes an almost necessary extension of us. There is, in the crowds and lights, a sensation of being where things happen. And to miss out becomes the enemy. To not be present where busy-ness occurs—it threatens contentment down to the very soul. We must feel alive or we shall not live.

It is utterly sensible and painfully turned around.

Thoreau penned life in terms of solitude and nature. But the man was not all right about all things. He correctly assessed that an escape of sorts—a running away to the woods—is a vast consolation to the mind. Our poor heads, stuffed so tightly with thoughts that often add nothing to us, they need a rest from shallow thinking. To breathe in deep of the hills and forests. A freshness that man cannot re-produce, no matter his efforts. Breathe, clear the brain. Make way for a simple, bottomless gratitude. A thank heavens in being allowed to live. And oh, how the woods stir us up and settle us down, in such a progression of reflective appreciations.

This said, it is not location that ultimately determines the position of the heart. Each of us chooses that placement for ourselves. A silencing of stupid thoughts is always within grasp. A reaching out for freshness ever possible. We recognize, if we want, that we are living, regardless of how we feel. And the setting of our hands to any noble task before us is to live “Spartan-like.” To not lose hope when selfishness says “despair!” is to establish sturdy-ness. To breathe deep, whether we risk or not, is “to live deliberately.”