Thoreau's Cabin. Part I: Haste v. Spontaneity

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts where he could escape from the rat race of his day. He resolved to “live deliberately,” and “front only the essential facts of life.” But it was what he said next that really struck me. On building his cabin he said, “In April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising, .” By not making haste with his work but by making “the most of it”, Thoreau overthrew the ethic of produce, produce, produce, and replaced it with an ethic of slow down, appreciate and enjoy. the spontaneity of the moment.  

If life felt hasty to Thoreau in 1845, I can’t imagine what he would make of today’s antics. We have enshrined overcommitment and frantic rush into our cultural DNA, while pausing to actually experience experience is seen as a slightly eccentric byway, mainly reserved for yoga studios and meditation seminars, but not ‘real’ life. Speaking of which, Thoreau said that he did not want to discover at the end of his life that he had not really lived it. But us? We don’t act like we share that concern.

In making “the most of” his work Thoreau didn’t mean it in the way you or I might if we said, “it was a rainy day at the beach but even so we made the most of it.” I believe he was talking about squeezing out all the joy from his sense perceptions, feelings and thoughts in every moment of his work. Simple things, I would guess, like the feel of the wood boards in his hand or the sun on his back, the simple things that can be a door to the divine. Children already have that without trying, while sages have done the work to get there. It’s that state of aliveness and spontaneity where you don’t really need much else to feel good.

When I was a child, we used to go on holiday to the countryside in England, and in the evenings after dinner I was allowed to wander off around the fields without the constraint of an adult to make sure that I was “all right.” As the evening crept on the starlings would rise up into what’s called a murmuration, a huge flock that rises and changes shape like a single being in the sky, a spectacle of pure motion. I would stand on top of a hill and become an instant sun worshipper as I watched it going down in a blaze of colour, and soon after that the owls would start hooting and I would come back, regretfully, to the farmhouse. Those moments threw me into a spontaneous ecstasy of colour, sound and beauty, and the whole ‘what is next?’ mentality was gone. That spontaneous contact is, I believe, the primary form of experience, the one that’s there before we clutter ourselves up. We have inadvertently exchanged fullness of heart for a scorecard of empty achievements.

And now, during this time of lockdown, I find a renewed invitation from the outside world to remember the spontaneous state. I have no trains to catch, my to-do list is a little bit shortened, and although I’m not as good at it as when I was nine, I can sometimes unwind a little, take walks and notice things for themselves, -- like the sky, the bark on trees, the busy birds. This state of happy noticing is opposite to haste, and it gives us some of the high energy fuel that makes us truly contented. Beat that, capitalism!