To Live Deliberately

I've stood before the carved wooden sign at Walden Pond that bears these words two times now. I first stared at it as a ten-year-old who had been dragged halfway across the country to Massachusetts on my older brother's college roadtrip. Face-to-face before the white words etched into noticably aging wood, I wondered 1) when we could leave and 2) what living deliberately even meant. Returning to the sign seven years later - this time on my own college search, the one on which I asked if I could stay in Massachusetts forever - I paused at the sign, looking closely and wondering, for the first time, what living deliberately might mean for me.

Five years later, and "to live deliberately" is still on my mind. Living deliberately has been a concept that - despite, or maybe because of, its elusive meaning - has invisibly challenged me, scared me, energized me, and pushed me toward the center of my being during my years at College of the Holy Cross, a year studying in Spain, and most recently as I discerned what was next, what came after college, what I'd do with the first chapter of my life for which there was no pre-established path. 

Transcendentalists like Thoreau were frustrated with their world as it was - material, fixated on the fleeting, dead. In his reflection Walden, Thoreau makes clear that his frustration with society is exactly what prompted his exodus from it. I recently revisited the copy of Walden I first fell irretreviably in love with and marked up with annotations six years ago. 160 years have passed since Thoreau first published it, but I still connect deeply to his reflection. Like Thoreau, I am frustrated with society. I am upset with its pervasive injustice. I am overwhelmed by my generation's - as well as my own personal - dependency on technology and investment in the fleeting gratification of social media. I am saddened by our fierce individualism and our only-growing prioritization of things over people. I see the fractured nature of the world around me, and my frequent complicitness before structures and actions that only leave it more rife with brokenness, and it scares me. I see myself all too often living un-deliberately.

Thoreau withdrew, in the face of the society he found so paralyzed by the petty, to the isolated woods of Massachusetts for two years and two months. There he sought, in solitude and silence, the deliberately-lived life he found himself, and his world, sorely lacking. For some reason, however, retreating into solitude doesn't seem like my own calling. I've come to find incredible peace, harmony and consolation in nature, but an indefinite retreat from the city is not what I desire. I want, in fact, quite the opposite. Something tells me it's my education in the Ignatian tradition, but I just can't be away from people for long - from their beauty, from their complexity, from their humanity. I want to be with people. So I've committed to living counterculturally - and trying to live deliberately - for the same span of time as my transcendentalist hero but in an entirely different context. In my own context.

I desire to live deliberately these next two years but not by myself, apart from the world. Rather, I want to enter deeply into the world, to sit with the world and its beauty and its mess, to suck the marrow out of life not by self-selecting out of society, but by opting in, by going where it's convenient/easy/preferable/safer not to go, and seeing what I find and who I encounter there.

My prayer these next two years as I journey to the center of it all - to Santiago de Chile, a capital city, a city of 6 million people - is that I accompany the people and celebrate the culture I come to know there, that I learn about myself by prioritizing learning about others, and that I look back on these years of service knowing I had, in my own way, lived deliberately.