What I Lived For

I just spent an entire weekend without Internet access, and it was grand. I brought my laptop, and I could have found internet somewhere if I really tried. But since I didn't have broadband in my room, I just left the laptop dark. I preferred to live simpler this weekend, and spend more time on the lake or in the pool with my family. Had the Internet been available, I would have spent more time working and playing alone on my laptop, rather than splashing and chasing and tickling and talking and enjoying exercise, sun, clean air, water, and the laughter of children. I am a wealthier man today for having spent my time without the laptop, though money has nothing to do with it. My account of smiles and warm, fuzzy feelings is now overflowing.

I awoke early every morning with a head full of thoughts; I am always the first one up anywhere I go, unless I am with my dad. I had a laptop, but I left it in its bag. Instead, I journaled early in the morning, on a balcony looking out over trees to Table Rock Lake, in complete silence save for the bugs. I used paper and pen, I wrote words across a page, trying not to smudge ink and occasionally relieving hand cramps. When the smokers next door hacked and choked their way outside for their first death-stick, I knew it was time to wrap it up and head in.

For some reason, that hand-cramping and smudging is "real writing" to me. I write faster on a keyboard, and I end up with more polished thoughts through the ease of editing. However, paper and pen is so much more intimate to me. I feel like I am really seeing the contents of my brain, heart, and character. I make a lot of Freudian-like slips when I write longhand because my brain is 10x faster than my pen. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that my pen is 10x slower--I do not want to give the illusion that my brain works quickly, especially early in the morning, on vacation, before the coffee has started flowing. However, those slips reveal the connection of my hand to my brain, and the connection of thoughts that were spilling out.

I doubt any of that writing will end up here or anywhere else. It was an exercise of thinking, and of further examining my life. I needed to get away from home and technology to get closer to my family. I also needed those same conditions to get even closer to myself. I fantasize about getting totally alone, away from all electricity, not even a cell phone, in a mountain cabin for a few days. I would really like to see what I learn about myself when it is just me, the bugs, and a journal. That is probably why the most useful and enjoyable book, to me, is one where the author did exactly that for several seasons.

While writing, or just sitting and staring, I often thought of a quote from Thoreau about "...sucking the marrow out of life..." and wished I had brought Walden with me. I made a mental yellow-sticky note to look up the passage when I returned to my office. Luckily the note stuck, rather than falling behind some mental filing boxes, or getting buried under some mental racy pictures. ;)

Here is one of my favorite quotes ever, and my opinion of writing at its best; Henry David Thoreau in his masterpiece Walden in the chapter "What I lived For":

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 practice 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, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."