Issue 91 - The Woods

Welcome to Issue 91 of Deep Life Reflections, where I share five things I’ve been enjoying and thinking about over the past week.

This week, I’ve taken a figurative walk in the quiet woods, and I invite you to join me. Our theme is living deliberately. There’s no better work to anchor this exploration than Henry David Thoreau’s seminal Walden, chronicling his experiences of life in the Massachusetts woods. From there, we turn to master filmmaker Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life—a no less sincere meditation on family, love, loss, and compassion, seen through the eyes of a 1950s American family. Together, we’ll reflect on these works in the context of our oversaturated lives and consider how we might each take small steps to live more deliberately.

Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.

1. What I’m Reading

Walden. By Henry David Thoreau.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

There’s something inherently appealing about retreating to the woods. Living amongst nature, harvesting the land, embracing solitude and quietness. To listen. To think. No doubt the relentlessness and white noise of modern life plays its part in our yearning to return to nature. But I wonder if there may be something deeper and more primal—a desire to live more deliberately, to strip away the excess and focus on what truly matters.

This desire to live deliberately inspired Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. A 19th-century American philosopher from Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau spent a little over two years (1845-47) living alone in a simple wooden cabin he built with his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond. He wanted to see if he could live independently and apart from society. Thoreau lived off the land, growing beans and other crops to sell, while devoting much of his time to writing and reading. These experiences formed the first draft of Walden, widely regarded as his masterpiece and still highly influential today. Poet Robert Frost once said, “In one book… he surpasses everything we have had in America.”

Walden is a collection of Thoreau’s meditations on his life in the woods. The chapters explore broad themes like solitude and reading, as well as more specific topics such as ‘The Beanfield,’ ‘The Ponds,’ and ‘Winter Animals.’ Thoreau writes with a wisdom and eloquence beyond his 28 years.

As someone who finds comfort in my own space and time, I enjoyed his reflections on solitude:

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond, than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. I am no more lonely than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?”

Yet, Thoreau is no recluse. He talks of the visitors who made the short journey to his cabin, often out of sheer curiosity to see the man who had forgone modernity for a simpler way of life. Thoreau stripped everything back to simplicity, observing “Our life is frittered away by detail.”

I’m always fascinated by the context in which a book was written. Walden was published six years before the U.S. Civil War, before the two world wars of the next century. Before the vast human wreckage caused by the warped ideologies of men like Hitler and Stalin. Before the rise of mass communications. Before computers, cars, and space shuttles. Before AI.

Thoreau’s retreat feels like an antidote to the chaos of what was to come—of what we will lose in our progress. The world has a different landscape today, or perhaps it doesn’t. Thoreau’s insights into simplicity and deliberate living remain just as relevant as when they were first jotted down in that cabin in the woods 180 years ago.

“Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.” 

2. What I’m Watching

The Tree of Life (2011). Directed by Terence Malick.

Terence Malick isn’t prolific, but he’s deliberate. Over five decades, he’s made just nine films, beginning with Badlands (1973) and most recently A Hidden Life (2019)—which I wrote about in an earlier issue. Malick takes his time—spending over a year in the editing room on all his films. He is a filmmaker of meticulous craft and thought. In 2011, he released The Tree of Life, which was nominated for Best Film at the Academy Awards. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know it isn’t an easy one to categorise.  

At its core, the film explores themes of family, loss, love, forgiveness, and the search for meaning. Malick explores these universal human experiences through the everyday life of the O’Brien family in Waco, Texas, during the 1950s. There’s a father, a mother, and three sons, all coming of age. The film opens with the family dealing with the death of one of the sons.

Nature and grace are the deep, intertwined roots of the same tree that permeates the film. Brad Pitt embodies the stern, disciplinarian father, representing the ‘way of nature,’ with its focus on survival, discipline and control. In contrast, Jessica Chastain’s kind and accepting mother reflects the ‘way of grace,’ offering compassion, forgiveness, and love. Together, they shape the O’Brien family’s world. Two different forces. Not always staying in balance.

The film won’t be enjoyed by everyone. It doesn’t follow a standard narrative arc. After introducing the family, Malick moves beyond them, presenting a series of incredible visuals, evoking nature, the universe, and the growth, expansion, and connectedness of everything within and beyond. These sequences show us life on a microscopic level and the evolution of the species, including the birth of compassion. This journey through time is like an IMAX experience and leads us back to the present moment—to all of us. Living our lives in the blink of an eye, surrounded by the vastness of time and space.

Throughout the film, characters voice philosophical statements like, “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” This is very Malick. This is a film he’d been thinking about since the 70s. He doesn’t spoon-feed the audience. Instead, he asks questions for us to consider. Questions about our fragility, the interconnectedness of all things, and the evolution and passage of time. Nature gives, and it takes away. If you go with the flow on this, I think you’ll be rewarded.  

The film’s vast scope reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s film also attempted to question the meaning of life, from the dawn of man to the farthest reaches of space. Like 2001, The Tree of Life explores cosmic ambition through the prism of relationship dynamics, particularly the stern father, the tender mother, and the children’s struggles to find their way—reflected in the present day through the eldest son (Sean Penn), now grown, trying to make sense of his life and journey.

The Tree of Life is ultimately a film about life itself—its beauty, pain and transience. The film acknowledges our mortality but also suggests a lasting connection that can continue long after we leave the earth. Trees, as symbols of life, death, and renewal, aren’t new, but here they feel familiar and comforting. It all culminates in a moving vision of the afterlife, where loved ones reconnect and greet each other, offering a sense of closure and transcendence, suggesting that love and connection endure, even beyond our fleeting time on earth.

And it all happens in the blink of a lifetime.

3. What I’m Contemplating

You may have heard that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’—a choice that feels both fitting and somewhat depressing, capturing how chronically online life has become.

‘Brain rot’ refers to the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, often caused by overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material. In today’s world, it’s fuelled by the relentless stream of daily online ‘slop’—an avalanche of meaningless images and videos.

Interestingly, the phrase ‘brain rot’ originates with Thoreau himself in Walden. In his conclusions, Thoreau criticises society’s tendency to devalue complex or nuanced ideas in favor of simpler, more digestible ones. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain rot—which prevails much more widely and fatally?” Thoreau’s words are prescient, warning against a decline in intellectual rigour that he saw even in his time.

And this was in the 1850s. Long before radio, television, and of course, social media. Have we always been concerned about triviality invading our lives—distracting us and eroding our sense of meaning and focus? Perhaps we’ve always been here. Have we reached a peak today? It feels like it. And I hope so.

In Walden and The Tree of Life, we have two works that act as a soothing antidote to brain rot. Both are different in their scope but are complementary: Walden looks inwards, focusing on the self and its relationship to nature, while The Tree of Life looks outward, exploring human existence within the vast mysteries of the universe.   

Both offer a path. Whether in the quiet woods or in the reflections on birth, death, and renewal.

Slowly, we may be waking up.

4. A Quote to note

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

5. A Question for you

What would happen if you dedicated one day to living as deliberately as possible—what would you change?

Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.

James

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