Removed
I haven’t been in school for a while now, not since early December, and I have to say that I’m loving the freedom it brings. While I am taking the one course, it doesn’t even feel like a course at all; more of a regular group discussion or something, as it’s held in a coffeeshop once every weekend. Though I’m working around the same amount as I did last semester when I was actually taking classes, it’s not the 10 hour a week low pay type of student jobs that ate up so much time last semester. It’s evening work, but I find that evenings are the best time to work – that way, I can take advantage of being free during business hours. I always wonder how business in service industries manage to attract business when so many of their potential customers are working at the times that they’re open. For myself, I can make all the phone calls and other appointments when the people I’m dealing with are actually available, and then work the evenings when I can’t get much done anyway. Though I do have some concern that not being in school is borrowing from my future; that I ought to get the degree out of the way quickly and then re-balance once I’m in the work force, the kind of balance I’m achieving now is something I simply couldn’t put off any longer. I’m reading far more than I did in school, and finding more time to explore, on my own time, the skills which make one a well-rounded person. 13 years of academics can really turn one into a very one-sided individual. I’ve been working out more; cycling more, reading more, cooking more, and lazing around more. Those are all fantastic things, and I feel great. Recently I finished Garth Turner’s “The Greater Fool” – a book which puts into perspective the shamefully positive spin the real estate industry puts out there on a daily basis, trying to con people into “investing” in real estate when they’re really not ready to do so. I’ve read Trevor Carolan’s “Return to Stillness,” in which Carolan, one of my profs at UFV, talks about the 20+ years he spent learning Tai Chi from Master Sifu Ng in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Rather than merely read about Tai Chi, perhaps I should take it up. The book certainly made me want to. Currently I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” recommended to me by a friend, not necessarily for it’s abilities to entertain, but for the insights into human nature. I can’t say I’m truly enjoying it, but it’s certainly an important read. I still have no idea how the title plays into the actual novel though. I’ve also made a lot of headway into Thoreau’s “Walden,” given to me by a friend last Christmas. Thoreau has such an assertive writing style. He was known as rather a grouch and as a cantankerous fellow, lived a very independent life of partial isolation, and spurned most of the accepted ways of doing things. He was opinionated, outspoken, and not afraid to speak his mind, unpopular though his views were. He also seemed very sure of himself, not given to second guessing his actions. Much of his writing is composed of flat, assertive statements about society and his contemporaries’ way of living. At the same time, his radical views and approach to life made him something of a self-imposed outcast; he never married; had little desire or inclination to travel therefore never really distancing himself from his mother and family. Women, or relationships, in fact, are one subject on which Thoreau sheds absolutely no light that I have been able to find. He is virtually silent on the subject, only once or twice mentioning the company of unnamed “ladies.” He once asked for someone’s hand in marriage, and was rejected, and he eventually died relatively young, in his fourties, of complications from a cold contracted while out inspecting some natural feature or other. He was lauded as a true American by his contemporary and landlord Ralph Waldo Emerson, and another, who visited Thoreau while he lay dying, said he had never seen someone dying so peacefully. Thoreau had harvested from this life all that he could, or wanted to, and when it came time to move on, he accepted it gracefully. He had once written that he “went to the woods because he 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 it came time to die, discover that I had not lived.” There are times when I am reading Thoreau, that it feels as if I am just looking in the mirror. I am no Thoreau, but if I had to choose one writer/philosopher who best represented me, Henry David Thoreau would have to be the one.
