Henry and Walt

It would be really good if I could take the advice of authors I read every year with my students. The Transcendentalists tend to lift my spirits when the December days are getting shorter and the darkness makes me wish humans hibernated. Every year Henry Thoreau reminds me that “Our life is frittered away by detail." He advises, "Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”

He makes it sound so, well, simple. And for a day or two, maybe even a week, I say "no" to being on another committee at work, or I pass on a social gathering when I really just want to be home with my husband and son. But it's February, and all the renewed resolutions to simplify have slipped away, but even if I wanted to change that, I'm not sure where to start. 

Oh, I can hear the ghost of Thoreau telling me that I have a choice, that I have as many choices as there are radii in a circle. But Thoreau wasn't married and he didn't have any kids, so I'm not sure that moving to a cabin in the woods for two years is really a choice for me, though I often wish it were. When I'm driving back and forth from school to home (make supper and throw in some laundry) to my son's driver's ed class (do some lesson plans while waiting) to yoga to a church meeting to home -- that cabin sounds very appealing. 

Luckily, by the time I start to get really frustrated, we are on to Walt Whitman and his eternal optimism. And with his encouragement, I go on playing my role,  "The same old role, the role that is what [I] make it, as great as [I] like,/ Or as small as [I] like, or both great and small," and I can once again see the parts that are great. 

Thanks, Walt.