Looking for the Marrow

Four ways to live life to the fullest

STRAWBRIDGE IMAGE with Bing

How can we not waste time, grab life by the tail, and live with focused intentions every day? How can we bonify our lives to make everything as “real” as possible?

The task at hand is to investigate ideas a person using a derisive, suspicious tone might call “deep.” Sometimes, that word is a substitute for “not important” and “waste of time.” I could not possibly disagree more.

No, I am a believer that humans should devote some significant number of hours weighing difficult questions about the nature of life and what should be done with it. At the same time, I tend to think that the “big questions” are not only for professors, philosophers, and rambling essays. Furthermore, the big questions are essential to gauge how we feel on a day-to-day basis; if we are content with the roles we play as a small part of the giant universe.

Every person has a choice. Either we can confront how life is best lived during this existence, or pretend it does not matter, ignore all considerations not immediately in front of our noses, and accept mediocrity for all our days. If this happens, we are just acting out an impression of ourselves.

My primary inspiration for this inquisitive spirit is Henry David Thoreau. He was a great writer and a Transcendentalist who lived during the middle of the nineteenth-century. He was atypical and controversial, as many original thinkers tend to be. In an attempt to really understand the world, he practiced what he preached by living in the wilderness, isolated, without any comforts available at the time. Specifically, I am interested in this famous thing he said:

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. I did not wish to live what was not life…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it…or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.

These sentences are among the most quotable ever written in American History, but let’s focus mainly on one phrase. What do you think Thoreau’s “marrow of life” means to us? What might it mean to you?

These passages from Walden; or Life in the Woods are the best or are as good as any American statement on living “life to the fullest.” I want to examine this notion of squeezing out every last bit of vitality from each day. This topic can be stated in more ways than one and has been debated using all kinds of methods.

Thoreau urged that it was important to know life in some primal form instead of via the facades that most people experienced as the norm. He was an idealist. The marrow of life meant pursuing some more natural and organic lifestyle away from the fake, modern world. So, to not waste our limited days on earth, we need to recapture something that has been lost or devalued.

This is not that unusual to our ears considering all the movements and philosophies that have been espoused since then.

Nature is the likeliest place to look in order to begin doing the kind of work that inches us closer to the marrow. It is reasonable that human beings of a certain mindset will suggest that we undergo some kind of regression lest we become “over-civilized.”

In the late nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt voiced his concerns that men were too “soft” due to the comforts of civilization. He idolized frontiersmen, cowboys, hunters, and…you get the picture. Roosevelt was a generation later than Thoreau, and they were not alike, but the future president advocated that people needed the wilderness for the sake of character-building.

The natural world vs. the one built by mankind makes for a reliable contrast. As many believe and hold dear, one world is God-made and the other constructed by his flawed creations. Just that word, natural, evokes innocence, purity, and even perfection.

Our human civilizations, though, are corrupted by avarice, lust, and the conceit that men can do anything as well as God can. So, we could go on and on about this easy comparison.

Following in Thoreau’s footsteps would lead us to what I call “back to nature” philosophies and behaviors. In this way, living a full life can only take place when we face the world in its bare-bones form. So, we must live close to the dirt, the rivers, the rocks, the trees, the vegetation, and the animals. You better get ready to get your hands dirty.

Dear reader, you are already thinking about examples in your head. Most people who get the itch to leave modern environments hunt, go camping, or spend weekends away at a cabin. The question is: does the back to nature approach allow a person to live out his days at some maximum degree of authenticity?

Does total immersion into natural environments equate to living at some optimum level, more so than your average person with an office job, who takes congested roads to work, buys groceries from a store, and the rest?

Thinking about Thoreau is an introduction to the multitude of ways human beings might conceive of living life to the fullest.

Living as thoroughly as possible, for many, involves a life far removed from meager simplicity in the outdoors.

Instead, the “thrill seekers” see human beings’ primary aim as seeing, tasting, feeling, and doing. These folks endeavor to know life by the intensity of its many possibilities. They want to understand all that is real life in a different way: by undergoing the pleasure, pain, and danger it has to offer.

These might be the men and women with bucket lists. They are the skydivers, the deep-sea divers, mountain climbers, and the types who dream of going on an African safari. Life’ s truest condition is the state of being overwhelmed.

There is an abundance of other activities we can add to the list, with some of them very unadvisable.

Let us turn our attention to a third category. For these, we are not doing our best unless driven by higher purposes outside our selfish interests. So, yes, some religious people can raise their hands, but that is not nearly all.

I now refer to a nice bunch of people I will call “the crusaders.” Life is designed for engaging in as many meaningful and conscientious undertakings as can be conceived. The delights of doing what is the most real is an inward development and not an outer receiving of something spectacular.

They are studious and concerned about human rights around the world. They may be extremely political or be the opposite and lack all desire to get involved in the political realm. They need a battleground to belong to, which can be in physical form or consist of changing others’ minds for the better.

Many writers and other artists can be classed as crusaders, and they often clash with the folks who compose our next grouping.

I cannot leave out materialism as an option for living life to the fullest. Plenty of people consider success to be the most valuable indicator of doing one’s best while living in a results-driven world.

It really is a matter of who has the most or best houses, cars, vacations, and etc. Doing whatever one desires due to accumulated wealth, power, and prestige: this is the heart of living the good life.

The “materialists” are the ones, based on my thoughts in this story, most likely to see life as a game. Also, the materialists might imagine the marrow of life to be leisure, physical pleasure, and opulence. In my head, I see this image of a Roman Emperor-like scenario where a person can grant all his wishes without the need for a genie. Surely, this kind of life is attractive.

How can people secure the absolute most out of life? I am very eager to hear your thoughts. I am positive we could invent a few more categories to be compared with those here.

One thing is certain, upon your death you will not wish for extra allotted time to do what we do 99% of the time. All that stuff falls away, and worrying about what others think, as one example, will not make any difference at all.

We will desperately plead for more days with that person or those people and/or a few more hours pouring into whatever interests ignite our passions. So, that gives us a good start as far as what we should be doing now while alive.

It is clear that what you imagine your dying self to prioritize more than anything is that something to concentrate on every day, as much as allowable. I am not of the opinion that it is feasible to actually “live every day as if it is your last.” Right?

There are many pitfalls when trying to apply principles in our heads to the exigencies of living. Right now, I am writing a story on the internet. I have aspirations to be well-read and affect others in some positive manner. My heart may be in the correct place. Yet, I could be out lending aid to the poor or to the homeless. Am I mismanaging my time?

One could devote their lives to humanitarianism. Or, our person in this scenario might give most of their money away to great causes. Life is like a scale, though, and going to great lengths in one area of life means neglecting some other part of it.

For the most part, I am not interested in sloughing off modernity and all it offers. No, I will not live in seclusion for two years as did Mr. Thoreau. For one, I would not last very long. Instead, I am taking from his commentary the lessons that apply to me and my life. I love that art works this way.

We need to ensure that the marrow of life does not slip too far from our conscious minds. I believe Thoreau, and any philosopher or regular person who entertains ideas of how life is best lived, to be delving into mental health without realizing it. That is one way of saying that deep thinking actually makes a difference to our state of mind, which to me sounds close enough to the health of our minds.

My contentment may depend on aligning my heart and soul with my personality and actions. This is the only way I have discovered to rest easy believing I am not indifferent to the passing of time. So, basically, the inside needs to correspond to the outside.

My mental state is reliant on this, which is my interpretation of Thoreau’s use of the word deliberate.

My solution to sucking out the marrow of life resides in another oft-repeated passage from Thoreau. He said: “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”² This is what I must make an oath to avoid.

I must not silently suffer only playing roles that are convenient for others while betraying my natural Self. If you do not know who you are, finding out is the first step. There is a freedom in making even the tiniest decision to begin every day as you and not another person. If you get there by returning to nature, or not, or through some circumstances not mentioned here, I think that is just fine.

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¹ Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854, pg. 69.

²Thoreau Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1906.

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