Thoreau Thursday 1: Living Deliberately
Why I'm Writing Weekly into the Wilderness of the World Wide Web
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“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.”
Henry David Thoreau — Walden (1854)
(pg. 72 in my $10 illustrated copy)
Your attention has finite supply, but infinite demand. Social networks… family relationships… entertainment platforms… professional opportunities… societal obligations… political pressures… intellectual interests… artistic pursuits… constant information overload plus the pull of external expectations. Is it any wonder that so many of us often just “go along to get along” and “take the path of least resistance” to live, more or less, on autopilot?
Deliberately… de-liberate-ly. In some sense, an abundance of options liberates you from limitations. Under tyranny, after all, important choices are decided for you — at best, dictators merely allow the illusion of choice.
Without being grounded by shackles, however, your attention can be pulled into a perpetual, multi-directional “tug of war” between all of those surrounding possibilities. This can result in “choice paralysis” — feeling so overwhelmed by options that you shut down entirely — or attempts to multitask, stretching your attention so thin that it falls apart at the seams without even getting very far in any particular direction.
The process of writing manifests the process of thinking more deliberately. By curating disorganized thoughts into cohesively strategic action, a well-examined life becomes more fulfilling. In this post now, I went to the woods… just the first of many steps to come. Individually, to attain practical liberty, I will LIVE more deliberately.
My main Three takeaways:
Your attention at any given moment has extraordinary value because infinite demand competes for its finite supply
The process of writing bridges the gap between thoughts and action by establishing consciously crafted structure
Relevant Bonus Quotes:
“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst”
Albert Camus
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Discipline equals freedom”
Jocko Willink
“Most of the problems in life are because of two reasons, we act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting”
Zig Ziglar
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
Socrates