Living deep and wide with Thoreau, Seneca, and Russell

Just back from an invigorating hike in the Percy Warner woods with Younger Daughter and pups Pita and Nell, where we spotted a family of armadillos determinedly digging their way to who knows what, I'm put in mind of Thoreau's famous statement in Walden about why he went to the woods. It takes on a particular significance, when viewed through the Identity prism.

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 practise 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...

To dies without having lived is surely to have failed to secure a stable identity. 

And that reminds me of Seneca's famous statement about the brevity of life, which is yet a sufficiency.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

And that reminded Maria Popova of Bertrand Russell (and much else).  “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

The takeaway: don't waste time. Slow down. Enjoy life. Live wide, and deep.