Golden Advice: Henry David Thoreau and a Lazy Life

This last week I'm going to take some more genius from Henry David Thoreau and a Lazy Life. I am offering my take-aways from Thoreau's essay: Life Without Principle. 

Here's what I take from his words.  We live in a busy world with noise all around. We are plugged in and in a hurry. Many of us can't sleep at night, our minds revving with the busyness. Whatever happened to a day off?  Can you a imagine a day when everyone in town took a day off? No stores open. No running to soccer/baseball/football/basketball/lacrosse games. Everyone chilling for a day. Instead we are drowning in work, work, and more work.

And here I am marching to beat of my own drum. I'm living the lazy life. I've made a choice to spend my life scribbling my thoughts down, and I barely have enough money to buy my groceries, much less go to conferences, take courses, or have upgraded software. When people see me at the coffee shop with my computer,  they think I'm at some money-making activity instead of recording my thoughts about alien worlds and hysterical romances.

If I had been born imperfect, you know, without all the marbles up top, or had been so freaked out by some childhood experience, my daily writing activity might make sense. Folks would say, bless her heart, writing is all she can do. But I'm a writer by choice, and I suppose nothing is more useless than that, except maybe being a poet or a philosopher. 

Here I am not making a red cent, while my neighbor is building mini-malls and apartment complexes all over town. He's piling money in the bank for his ungrateful children to spend on flunking out of college and investing in worthless-Amway schemes. Here I am writing and writing, yielding the profit of a well-placed words, but I don't have two nickles to rub together. Yes, I am a lazy bunch of bones.

I'd rather walk through a meadow, dreaming up my stories, than spending my whole life tossing dollars into a stock market that's shearing the world of every bit of beauty in it. 

There you go. Live your lazy life. Write your story. I. Dare. You.

Here is another doodle: "Bouquet"

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau.