My Mentor Henry David Thoreau

 

I really didn’t have any mentors in my life.  A few people lent me a helping hand, but for the most part I had to find my own way. But if you expand the definition of Mentor then you can say I had many mentors, some of the best mentors in the world. They were the authors of books and their projects were to help me live a better life.

I found my first mentor when I was age 15. His name is Henry David Thoreau. He made a lasting impression on me then and still does. He taught me through his book Walden. I wasn’t very educated or thoughtful then, but I intuitively caught the spirit of his book; that one could think for oneself, question what society tells says is important, and stay connected to nature.  Important insights for young man at the beginning his life.

Thoreau lived from 1817 to 1862 and spent most of his life in the Concord Massachusetts area. He studied at Harvard College .  In 1845, as an experiment in living, he built a tiny house in the woods near Walden Pond and lived there 2 years. He fished and grew his own food.

He wrote: “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.”

Thoreau taught me three lessons that I have carried with me throughout my life: 

1.      Think for yourself and chart your own life.

2.      Simplify meeting your material needs in order to have time for other things.

3.      Live close to nature.

 

Thoreau wrote, “If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius…that way, …his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind.”

 “Our life is frittered away by detail. 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.”

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.”

 “…I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object…There can be no black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”

Thoreau was not a hermit. He wrote: “Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear the gossip which was incessantly going on there, circulating from mouth to mouth … which taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.”

He admired those who worked business: “What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery...I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even then they suspect, and are perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised.”

As Thoreau's protégé I took his lessons to heart. I questioned society’s conventional goals. I resolved to think and to decide for myself what successful life is. I’ve tried to simplify meeting my material needs in order to have time for other things. I didn’t knock myself out climbing a career ladder. A modest income was fine for me. I didn’t need a grand house, a fancy car or the latest gadget. A small house, a reliable old car, a few essentials did the job just fine.

I’ve never paid a cable TV bill. I don’t think I’ve missed much. And I got to keep something more valuable than money, the precious and limited time I have on this earth, which I used to enrich my mind. A world of knowledge and wisdom is always as near as my public library, there for the taking.

I like being in natural places, because it reminds me I am a part of nature, a part of something much larger then myself.  I find nothing as refreshing as a walking in the forest, the hills, or the fields.  They say to me “you are at home here” The frantic concerns of city life slowly subside from my mind and I once again I get a sense of remembering who I am.

Thoreau wrote of his experiment: “I learned this…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Thoreau wrote: “In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”