Living Deliberately

During breaks in studying, or perhaps just due to a need to relieve stress, I've been cleaning house. Yesterday I straightened up the living room, bedroom, and cleaned and mopped the floor in the dining room. I even rearranged some furniture.

I found the whole process to be very rewarding, particularly ending it all by placing a big bowl of grapefruit on the dining room table. I think it all looks welcoming. And even better, it accommodates our lifestyle.

It got me thinking about how when our lives are so busy, when our obligations are so many that we just can't add anything to them, we lose the chance to sit back and arrange our lives in a pleasing way. That's what happens around here. And all the piles of things accumulating all around, they limit us too.

After yesterday's nesting, I felt washed clean and on top of things. And I got the phrase in my head, "living deliberately." I want to do more of this.

The photo is not so great, but it shows the fruits of my labor, and my loved ones enjoying breakfast.

Here is some Thoreau for you, where living deliberately must have come from, in the archives of my memory (we're talking 10th grade literature class):

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.

Still a good lesson, after all these years. Leafing through the book (we actually have a copy of it believe it or not) I found another quote of his: "I love my fate to the very core and rind."

I'd like to adopt that attitude too.