Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden Pond”, a celebration of solitude, simplicity and self-sufficiency, has inspired and instructed us since it was written in 1854. Thoreau’s ideas and insights about life, formulated while living alone with nature at Walden Park for two years, resonate to this day. On defining success, he said:
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
On searching for our purpose in life he said:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
So all these years later, Happy Birthday Henry David Thoreau. Thanks for reminding us about simplifying our lives and helping to point the way home.
More on Living the Simple Life:
- The Man who Built himself a House for Peanuts
- Need Vs Want
- Tiny Houses – Streamlined, Slick and Smart
- Happily Living Dirt Cheap in New York City
- 10 Reasons I’m Glad I’m Not Rich
- Living a Debt Free Life
- On the NYC Trail for Thrift Store Gems
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