You Don't Need a Bigger Life
Quiet Isn't the Problem
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Henry David Thoreau wrote that in Walden more than 170 years ago.
I’ve heard that line most of my life.
And lately I’ve been thinking about it differently.
At first, “quiet desperation” sounds like a warning against a quiet life.
That bothered me.
Because I live a pretty quiet life.
Peggy and I aren’t desperately searching for the next adventure. We’re not trying to fill every weekend or work our way through some giant bucket list before time runs out.
We teach our classes.
We take walks.
We go for drives.
We watch birds.
We spend time together.
We live in a beautiful little corner of the world where you can see an eagle sitting on top of a pine tree looking for breakfast, drive across the Columbia River a few minutes later, and somehow still be impressed by the whole thing even though you’ve done it hundreds of times.
That’s a pretty good morning around here.
And I’ve never thought of any of it as desperation.
Then it hit me.
Quiet isn’t the problem.
Desperation is.
Thoreau wasn’t condemning people for living quietly. In the very next sentence he talks about resignation.
That’s different.
You can live a simple, quiet life and be completely engaged with it.
And you can live an incredibly busy life while quietly wishing you were somewhere else.
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
How many people aren’t really unhappy enough to change anything?
They get up.
Go to work.
Pay the bills.
Make dinner.
Watch television.
Go to bed.
Do it again tomorrow.
Ask them how they’re doing and they’ll probably say the same thing most of us say.
“Fine.”
And they are fine.
Sort of.
Nothing is terribly wrong.
But somewhere along the way, pieces of their life started disappearing.
They stopped doing something they loved because it became a little harder.
They stopped calling somebody.
Stopped going somewhere.
Stopped learning.
Stopped laughing as much.
Stopped noticing things.
Maybe their body became less capable, so their world slowly became smaller with it.
Nothing dramatic happened.
There was no announcement.
They just quietly stopped participating.
I think that’s the desperation Thoreau was talking about.
Not sadness.
Not failure.
Resignation.
The belief that this is just how things are now.
Especially as we get older.
I’ve heard versions of it for years.
“My knees are shot.”
“My balance isn’t what it used to be.”
“I can’t do that anymore.”
“That’s what happens when you get old.”
And sometimes there are real limitations. I’m not pretending otherwise.
But I’ve also watched people accept limitations long before their bodies required them to.
That’s a very different thing.
I’ve spent almost twenty years working with people who thought some part of their life was over.
Then one day they got back on the floor.
Walked up the hill.
Worked in the garden.
Got back on the horse.
Sometimes the victory looks ridiculously small from the outside.
It isn’t.
Because what they really got back wasn’t flexibility or strength.
They got back a piece of their life.
And maybe that’s what living well is really about.
Not constantly searching for more.
Not trying to make every day extraordinary.
Not turning life into another self-improvement project.
Just being there for it.
I don’t need a bigger life.
I rather like this one.
A walk with Peggy can be enough.
An eagle in a tree can be enough.
A room full of people laughing while we’re supposed to be exercising can definitely be enough.
You don’t have to live loudly to live fully.
But you do have to participate.
A full life isn’t measured by how much you can fit into it.
It’s measured by how much of it you’re actually there for.
If this gave you something to think about, the member section is where we put it into practice.
Each Sunday, we’ll take the idea we’ve been exploring and turn it into something simple you can actually try in your own life.
No giant checklist. No homework assignment that makes you wish you’d stayed a free subscriber. 😂
Just a little help turning “Hmmm, that’s worth thinking about” into “What might that look like in my life?”
Join us if you’d like to keep going.
