photo by Collyn Ware

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; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms… ― Henry David Thoreau

Recently, I was talking with a friend, a realtor who specializes in farm land and acreages. When I asked if he’d been busy (thinking he probably hadn’t been since it’s the dead of winter in Iowa), he answered with a resounding yes. Really, I said. At this time of year? He reported that people were buying up land all over southeast Iowa. Even people from out of state, from the coasts, he said. We both speculated on this phenomenon and decided that our Covid year had prompted some to seriously rethink where and how they lived. You’re not going to bump into any stars on any boulevard around here, but you might bump into a white-tail doe and her twins. Literally, if you don’t drive defensively!

I’ve thought about this conversation a lot in the past week. I have a smorgasbord of delights outside my windows: song birds of all sorts and sizes, deer who visit nightly, unblemished snow that blankets the back yard until it winds its way into the timber, sunrises and sunsets to make you weep. For the twenty years I’ve lived on this acreage, I’ve had all these sights and sounds to enjoy, and yet, I’d be lying if I said that I’ve always enjoyed them as I have this past year. I’d be fibbing if I said that I lived deeply and sucked all the marrow out of life, that I lived deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life. Of course, I haven’t. For too long, I’ve been too busy living–or so I thought–to live.

If Thoreau were my mentor, not my literary but my life mentor, I have no doubts that he’d call me into his office. Do you want to know how many times you looked outside today, how many times you looked up from your book or computer screen? I can count them on one hand. Actually, I can count them on one finger. You’re on probation–indefinitely–until you can improve your life. And this would be fair and kind enough. Averaging my pathetic performance over the past two decades, I would’ve scored low enough to be legitimately expelled. I may have had a smorgasbord of delights all around me, but often I took them for granted just as I took too many other things for granted. Holding a red marking pen and balancing a stack of student papers on my lap, I resigned myself to a life-on-hold.

With far fewer distractions, many of us have come to live more deliberately, driving our lives into corners and reducing them to much lower terms. I can still recall the bliss (and this word doesn’t do it justice) of floating in my above ground pool, orioles, finches, and grosbeaks flying in and out of the oak trees, a cloudless, cobalt sky above me, and sun enough to warm my bones. I remember thinking how blessed I was to have all of this just outside my door. I remember thinking how life didn’t get much better than this.

Throughout history, there have been writers and leaders who celebrated living dearly. They admonished us, cajoled us, shamed and loved us into cultivating better lives. This is nothing new. It may be sadly new for many of us, though, for we’ve lived our lives in the land of conveniences, on the treadmills of production and on the ladders of success. Having learned them in school, we’ve been educated enough to recite Thoreau’s aphorisms. We’ve put them on posters that hung in our classrooms and offices. We’ve used them to introduce speeches and essays. They’ve been our friends:

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . .
• I learned this, at least, by my experiement: 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.
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

But calling them our friends is clearly not enough. I just finished Charlotte McConaghey’s new novel, Migrations. Her protagonist, Franny Stone, is on a mission to find the world’s last flock of arctic terns on their migration from pole to pole. Some reviewers have called this novel an ode to a threatened world, for readers begin to realize that it’s not only the arctic terns that are endangered. The great schools of fish are gone, leaving the ocean barren. There is no bird song, the birds native to different parts of the world now extinct. Franny drives her life into a precious corner and reduces it to a solitary goal: seek and love the arctic terns. She wants nothing more than to come to the end of her life knowing that she lived deliberately, and thus lived well.

We all have those corners into which we might drive what is most precious to us. And once there, we might come to see that, in doing so, we’ve reduced the clutter of our lives to the lowest and most valuable terms. We don’t need a pandemic to live more deliberately, but for many of us, months of living quite differently than we’ve ever lived before have jump-started this. I don’t want to be out-deliberated by some Californian who jubilantly buys ten acres of Iowa hardwoods, birds, and solitude. I want to see the wealth of my rural world. And not because someone else values it, but because I want to come to the end of my life and say I have lived, that I tasted deeply and sucked all the marrow from my 3.6 acres, my decades of living and loving.

I want my mentor, Henry David Thoreau, to pronounce my probation period over. And I want to hear his parting words: Live deeply, dearly, deliberately, my friend.

 
  
 End Roll
 for my mother on her birthday
  
 It’s a gift from the newspaper office, you say—
 an end roll of newsprint on a spool
 that stands 3 feet tall on its cardboard spine—
 free for the taking. 
  
 All yours, you say,
 and I watch as the center cannot hold,
 as paper begins to unspool itself
 like yarn from a wild skein.
  
 At first, I can’t bring myself to put pencil to paper.
 The white field before me is too dear.
  
 But even at twelve, 
 I understand the invitation before me.
 The furrows of my palms loosen,
 and then I begin to draw what I’ve only imagined—
 tentative at first, but then surer—
  
 until I’ve given form to an acre of possibilities
 until I’ve drawn right up to the cardboard core.
  
 I’m still the one who trembles before paper,
 the one who finds the world on the back of an envelope,
 whose hours are lost and gained 
 when my pen finds its way. 
  
 I was born a fallow field
 where shapeless, wordless things would incubate,
 the loam of my lifetime deeper and richer because
 even before I knew this,
  
 you knew. 

We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: the Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist, Anthony Malcolm Daniels, also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, understands too well the slippery slope of moral enthusiasm. There’s often nothing more exhilerating than to ride the tide of moral enthusiasm. This is the stuff that cultural–and personal–dreams are made of. Righteous indignation blossoms into full-fledged moral enthusiasm, and the world lies at our feet. Sometimes trembling in anticipation or sometimes in fear, sometimes sleeping, blissfully unware of what’s to come, the world is our playground–or perhaps more aptly, our stomping ground. For when moral enthuiasm comes at other people’s expense, our speech and actions may leave a path of destruction in their wake.

Memes commemorating 2020 will undoubtedly continue into the new year. Most of us were all too eager to ring out the year-from-hell. We joked about the “new normal,” and yet, truthfully we weren’t laughing. Quarantined in our homes, our interactions with the outside world came largely through the internet and television. And what we saw there was anything but normal. Hospitals struggled with the influx of Covid patients, death rates climbed, dire predictions abounded, and authorities debated the best courses of action. And then as the world grappled with the horrors of a pandemic–the likes of which it hadn’t experienced for a century–we took to the airwaves. First in relative solidarity and then increasingly in conflict, we plastered social media with proclamations of what to do, how to think and live in this new age of pandemic.

On the heels of pandemic came nationwide racial, social, and political conflict, the intensity of which harkened back to the 1960s. Again, some of us took to the airwaves, first to comment and then increasingly to shame. Some lived through social media, eager to agree with those who espoused like ideas and equally eager to refute those who didn’t. Moral enthusiasm was the name of the game, and it was the only real game in town.

Clearly, moral enthusiasm isn’t, by nature, a bad thing. We depend upon those who think and act with moral enthusiasm which makes–and has made–our world a better place. We can’t imagine our lives without the thinkers and doers who are so excited by cell biology or artificial intelligence or genomics. Too often, we take for granted those whose moral enthusiasm has led to social, economic, environmental, medical, and political innovations that have changed our world. True, many will argue that these changes haven’t always been good or that their consequences have been dangerous. In the past year as the world’s scientists worked feverishly to develop safe Covid vaccines, many of us questioned the safety and efficacy of their work. But just as many of us applauded the benefits of such work and respected the moral enthusiasm that fueled the countless hours spent in laboratories.

In 2020, I watched as we wielded our moral enthusiasm like machetes. With edges sharpened on the stone of good intent, our words often macerated anything in their ideological paths. We unfriended others on Facebook. Some of us even posted terse announcements that we were taking a break from social media altogether. And some of us held such aggregious views that others canceled us (or we canceled them). Paradoxically, people across political, social, and educational spectrums were equally enthusiastic, equally confident of their moral compulsions: police or no police, face masks or no face masks, vaccine or no vaccine, in-person schooling or no in-person schooling, incumbent president or no incumbent president. We ruminated within the four walls of our homes. Sometimes, our ruminations morphed into alien beings with lives of their own, and like mad scientists, we took pleasure in our creations.

But as we leave 2020 and look forward to 2021, we face a real dilemma: how do we promote and nuture moral enthusiasm that has the power to positively change systems, cultures, and even nations without destroying individuals? It would be foolish to suggest that there is an easy solution to this dilemma. History is a mausoleum of moral enthusiasts and those who suffered under their reigns. Yet, it’s also a memorial of moral enthusiasts and those who prospered under their reigns. What to do, what to do. . .

Dalrymple may not have the solution to our dilemma (who could?), but he offers sage words that seem particularly apt for our future:

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviors. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

This is a New Year’s resolution worth adopting, I think. To be decent despite everything, to improve what is in my power to improve, to refuse to see myself as a savior, to live humbly in my enthusiasm. For me, it will be a daily (hourly?) struggle, but the fruits of this labor may be the bravest, noblest struggle of all.