The Good Life

The one fact that I would cry from every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us - here and now.

-B. F. SKINNER

In 1932, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Scott and Helen Nearing abandoned life in New York City to become twentieth-century pioneers in the Green Mountains of Vermont. They were socialists, pacifists, and vegetarians; they were also inventive visionaries determined to create a completely self-sufficient lifestyle that was solely dependent on their wits, hard work, and perseverance.

The Nearings went in search of the good life: "simplicity, freedom from
anxiety. . . an opportunity to be useful and live harmoniously." Two decades later they had succeeded and wrote a homesteading handbook, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World.

This book barely caused a ripple when it was published in 1954; those were the affluent postwar years when a television in every living room, a barbecue grill in every backyard, and a station wagon in every suburban driveway was considered the good life. But in 1970, when the book was published as a paperback, it became a best-seller and the bible of alienated barefoot baby boomers in search of flower power, love, peace, and communal nirvana.

When I began the Simple Abundance journey, I was eager to discover all the advice, encouragement, and wisdom I could find to point me toward the good life. However, the Nearings' grueling saga, which included wresting Utopia from the earth twice (they moved from Vermont to Maine when the area surrounding their farm was being developed as a ski resort), is mythological in scope. Their daunting exploits don't just inspire, they exhaust. I certainly can't identify with a woman who could build a stone house by hand when she was in her seventies and her husband was in his nineties.

And as for the life they 1ed after the house was built, "good" doesn't begin to do it justice. Try saintly. Living the Good Life is often described as this century's Walden, but the Nearings' ceticism rnakes Thoreau, who loved his salt pork, look like a sybarite. They drank only water, juices, and herbal brews and consumed little more than raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds "that have finished their life cycle," and copious quantities of popcorn. There was no salt, sugar, tea, coffee, dairy products, or eggs in their pantry, and naturally they did not smoke or drink alcohol. Honey was used only sparingly because it "exploited the bees," and maple syrup which they tapped and sold for cash or bartered-was swallowed with a smidgen of guilt because it sucked "the life blood of noble maple trees."

Of course, this explains why Scott lived to be 100 and why Helen, who is now 91, is still going strong. Perhaps the secret to the "good life" is revealed in the Nearings' simply abundant suggestions for living less stressfully, which Helen shared in her moving memoir, Loving and Leaving the Good Life:

. Do the best you can, whatever arises.
. Be at peace with yourself.
. Find a job you enjoy.
. Live in simple conditions; housing, food, clothing; get rid of clutter. .
Contact nature every day; feel the earth under your feet.
. Take physical exercise through hard work; through gardening or walking.
. Don't worry; live one day at a time.
. Share something every day with someone else; if you live alone, write someone;
give something away; help someone else somehow.
. Take time to wonder at life and the world; see some humor in life where you can.
. Observe the one life in all things.
. Be kind to the creatures.

I've no doubt that if we lived these suggestions every day, not just thought about them, we would realize as the Nearings did, that the good life is truly here and now.

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