The Master said,
“The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest
are near to virtue.”
—Analects of Confucius - Book 13, Chapter 27
In elementary school, I had a music teacher named Mr. Creepy, or something like that. I remember thinning wisps of gray, wrinkled skin over a bony frame, and disturbingly yellow fingernails, grown out for the purpose of plucking guitar strings. I didn’t have much life experience then, but I knew he was strange from the moment I saw him.
One day, Mr. Creepy brought in an old-school projector, the kind that rattled as it shifted from one slide to the next, and he gave us an unsolicited glimpse into one of his personal endeavors. We put aside aimlessly blowing into our recorders for a day to listen to the story of an adventure he’d been on. I don’t recall the specific details of where, when, or why, but he shuffled through slides of a sabbatical that, in retrospect, seemed like a spiritual journey.
In short, he had abandoned all his worldly possessions for thirty days (including his shirt, if my memory serves me) and went off to live in the woods. I mean really live in the woods. This guy carved his own canoe out of a tree and paddled up a river, for Pete’s sake. This was no weekend camping trip with a propane stove; he was out there.
At that age, I had no interest in Mr. Creepy or his personal affairs (nor the recorder, for that matter), but the older I get, the more there’s a nagging feeling that tugs at my sleeve, urging me to return to a simpler lifestyle. It’s an itch you can’t scratch with a rotisserie chicken from Costco, and I wish I could have appreciated what Mr. Creepy was trying to share back then.
This world of office jobs and technology: it’s so... so...
Rush hours and coffee pots and thirty-minute lunch breaks: Is this what we’re here for? As much as I enjoy shoveling down a store-bought meal in a climate-controlled room, part of me longs to be like Mr. Creepy on sabbatical. The prospect of survival breathing down your neck, the feeling of elation after catching your own meal, the connectivity with the world around you: these are the kinds of things that make you feel alive, or so I assume.
Mr. Creepy was old and decrepit back then, so I’d be shocked if he were still around to read this now, but if you’re out there, Creeps, just know that I finally appreciate what you were trying to inspire.