Humans have always been drawn to beauty. Of course, beauty standards change all the time. What one culture considers beautiful, another might consider ugly. What our own culture considered beautiful 200 years ago, or even 50, isn’t beautiful to us anymore. But that hasn’t changed the fact that we love to look at beautiful things, and even more than that, we wish to be beautiful ourselves.
Often in literature, Ahab is viewed as a manic, almost inhuman character, so far gone to his revenge that he is not even recognizable anymore. However, I would argue that we can all have Ahab in us from time to time. Not only can we get obsessive about things, but we tend to place all our hopes and dreams onto things that can’t make all our problems go away. But the more steady your ship is, the easier it will be to sail through turbulent waters.
Our lives today are exceedingly fast-paced. Despite the fact that we continue to purchase technology that makes our lives easier, we also continue to take on more and more responsibilities. It seems like we spend most of our days on mindless or menial tasks that don’t really matter, but they seem “urgent.” It seems like there’s so much to do but so little time. Stress levels have never been higher. For the answer, perhaps we should turn to a time two hundred years ago, a time not unlike ours.
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” says Henry David Thoreau, 19th century American philosopher. For Thoreau, human life is much too cluttered by things that don’t matter. He expresses particular disdain for the post office — despite the mass of news and communication, very little meaningful things are being said. Because of this lack of meaning, because of the stress and drudgery of life, few people are truly awake anymore. He says, “the millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.” If we are not awake, if we are not alive, then what is the point of life? Our lives are not meant to be so cluttered and meaningless. However, a lot of times we feel trapped in our stress. We think we don’t have the power to change our lives. Thoreau urges us that this is not the case. He believes that we can all “elevate [our lives] by a conscious endeavor.” You can change your life by the power of your mind.
When Thoreau was writing his book, Walden, he withdrew to live in a cabin in the woods. He said that he did this because he wished to “live deliberately.” He wanted to strip away everything unnecessary, to see what life really is at its core, so that he could truly live. He urges us to sift through “the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance,” and firmly ground yourself in this reality.
Now I bet this philosophy sounds really good to you. I know it sounds great to me. But the real question is, can we really do that? Can we really simplify in this crazy world? It seems impossible. This still isn’t something I’ve done completely successfully, so I feel like I can’t preach, but I do believe it’s possible, and Thoreau’s told us how to do it. There are two steps.
First, you need to dig down and find the core of your life. What are your values? Think long and hard about this. Make a list of what is important to you. Often, we find that we’re spending most of our lives doing things that are not important to us at all. Use this list of values to ground you. Yes, sometimes you’ll have to do menial errands, but that shouldn’t be your whole life.
Second, we must bring some wonder into our lives. Thoreau says that we reawaken and keep ourselves awake “by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” All great art, great poetry, great thought happens in the morning, when we wake up reinvigorated and ready for life.
Think about how you feel when you take a walk. If you don’t take walks, you really should try it. When you’re on a walk, it’s just you, alone with nature and silence (or music — that’s good too). All the little everyday stresses just melt away. You can take full breaths, in, out, and really think clearly. These are the times when you see the beauty around you and truly appreciate it. These are the times when you think about what’s really important to you. Don’t let them pass you by. Seize them, and seize the life you want. Seize beauty, seize art, seize the dawn.
That’s the sort of life we ought to aspire towards — a life where we wake up ready for each day, ready to be amazed by the beauty that life has to offer us.
(Picture: Walden Pond, MA, where Thoreau wrote Walden.)
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues that relativism will destroy the youth of our culture if they do not learn to manage their appetites. This cannot be done with the mind or the heart, but with the “chest,” with trained emotions.