Transcendentalism

There is an interesting paradigm occurring in the World right now: That of self-quaruntine, imposed individualism, and simplicity vs. our former way of life.

In the face of COVID-19, when we teach the need to "unite six feet apart," there's a collective craving to streamline, focus, center, and essentially, pare down. It wasn't forced prior to this pandemic, but now all of a sudden we're all living it.

The trend prior to our Pandemic was of minimalism, Marie Kondo's tidying up theories, and the "Do Less" book/blog of author Kate Northrup, to a point that Elle magazine published an article in its January 2020 issue entitled "Much Ado About Nothing," illustrating our (women specifically) productivity-obsessed scheduling. We were barely worried about a world of scarcity prior to February 2020.

Now we are living it.

Let's look to our predecessors, the radical Transcendentalists circa mid-1800s, who believed that we could achieve higher senses through intuition and imagination. They believed in... existing... not as a form of religion, but rather a form of belief.

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Wrote Henry David Thoreau from his self-isolation experience documented in Walden (1854). "I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify."

To that point, and within my own journey of reconnecting with nature in these "simple" times, I say let's learn and grow from human history, especially the progressive parts and theologies.

That will likely be the key to reshaping future for mankind.