I don't read the Bible but I know people who will grab that book or another, open it, and let it 'speak' to them. They look for purpose and meaning in the opened page. Well recently I stumbled along these words (online I admit) and was stood still, if only a moment, by their continued relevance (formatted for emphasis):
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion... The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, ... ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
It lives too fast.
Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain."*
On a hot sunny day here in Reading, UK as I wrestle with my dissertation, motivation waning, Thoreau's words resonate a century and a half later. Summer is the time for getting back to nature, eating outside, picking fruits and vegetables, fishing. Awoken this morning by the vibration of a text message on my phone, I couldn't help but wish I was in the forest or better yet, on a boat at sea.
I have a friend who is now packing for Mongolia and a year long contract. In the whirlwind of visas, house rentals and school work, I want to tell her that the calm will come when she is on the plane between England and Mongolia. For it is above the earth, away from the phones and emails, surrounded only by clouds that we can give ourselves over to fatigue and let our minds wander. Behind us is the known, in front the unknown and what will be. Isn't that why we travel?
To cut down on possessions and have a little spending money in the pocket is true freedom I say. Simplify indeed!
Happy Travels,
Amanda O'Neil
Executive Director
My Travel Bug, Inc.
*Henry David Thoreau, Walden- Chapter 2
