Long before the economy was looted and the environment polluted, Henry David Thoreau said: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.”
Thoreau, with his “deep love of and respect for nature, has been called the father of modern environmentalism. He could describe at length the sound of a loon’s call, the vastness of a forest or the way a berry hangs off a bush.” “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote. Thoreau was an “early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land.”
Perhaps, to get an idea of what it means to perform a Thoreau Down, let’s hear from the man himself:
“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.”
“How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
Bukowski chimes in:
“At this time, there are too many people buying cars, TV sets, homes, educations on credit. Credit and property and the 8-hour day are great friends of the Establishment. If you must buy things, pay cash, and only buy things of value—no trinkets, no gimmicks."
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