Thoreau Went to the Woods. I Went to Costco.
Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845 because he wished to live deliberately. He built a cabin with his own hands, grew his own food, chopped his own wood, and spent two years stripping his life down to what actually mattered.
I just spent 15 days on a cruise ship in the North Atlantic. I had a facial.
I want to be clear — I have enormous respect for Thoreau. The man was onto something real. But I am 59 years old and my back is not what it was, and I have come to believe that deep thoughts and nice sheets are not mutually exclusive.
Here is a partial inventory of my deliberate living on this crossing.
I had sushi delivered to my cabin at 10pm on a Tuesday. I went to the thermal spa every evening, where the same naked man appeared every single night — hands cupped over what I'll diplomatically call his twigs and berries — for fourteen consecutive days. I never understood why he didn't just wear a towel. I never asked. Some mysteries you leave alone.
I had my first facial. I am 58 years old and I had never had one and it was genuinely excellent. Afterwards the aesthetician presented me with approximately fifteen hundred dollars worth of creams and serums. I — a man who genuinely struggles to say no to anyone — found somewhere inside myself the courage to decline. I did, however, book another facial before disembarkation. I'm still working on the no thing. It's a process.
And then there was the shore excursion.
The advertised attraction was the Knights of the Round Table's actual table. I was prepared to find it meaningful until I learned that carbon dating placed it at around 1200 AD — which somehow makes it both genuinely ancient and also, apparently, a forgery. A thousand-year-old forgery. I decided I could live without it.
So I went to Costco instead.
I want to be precise about this. There were no other Americans. It was just me — one American, alone, in a British Costco in Southampton, England, walking the aisles like an anthropologist. The English, it turns out, have a relationship with mayonnaise that I was not prepared for. I bought some clothes, because that is what 58-year-old men do. I bought gifts for the crew on the ship who had treated me so well — because when someone remembers your name out of 2,000 other passengers, you want to honor that. I ate a £1.50 hot dog in the parking lot.
Thoreau would have wept.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to.
Somewhere around day four on the water, something shifted. I stopped running the old software — the checking, the managing, the performing. The Atlantic is apparently one of the few things strong enough to interrupt that particular habit.
And I started thinking. Not productive thinking. Not strategy or planning or what comes next. The other kind. The kind that only surfaces when there's nowhere to be and no way to leave and the ocean goes to the horizon in every direction.
I thought about aging. About what I'm actually afraid of. About work I'd walked away from and why. About what it means to feel like yourself versus performing a version of yourself that stopped fitting years ago.
Heavy stuff. Arrived during a latte at 7am watching the North Atlantic sunrise.
Not a bean field. But the same questions.
Here's what I think Thoreau got right — and what I think he got slightly wrong.
He got right that most of us need a container. Something that removes the ordinary scaffolding long enough for us to see what's underneath. The job, the title, the routine, the identity we've been maintaining on autopilot — strip that away and something more honest surfaces. He was completely right about that.
What I'd push back on — gently, with genuine respect — is the idea that the container has to be austere to work. That discomfort is the mechanism. That you have to earn the insight by suffering for it.
My 58-year-old back slept on a very nice mattress for fourteen nights. I had a latte waiting every morning. I had a massage on Tuesday. The insight came anyway.
Maybe the thread count doesn't matter. Maybe what matters is just — stopping. Actually stopping. Long enough for the real questions to catch up with you.
Thoreau stopped in the woods. I stopped on a ship. Different zip code. Same question.
Thoreau left Walden after two years. Went back to Concord. Most people forget that part. He didn't stay in the woods forever. The woods were never the point. The point was what the woods did to him before he came back.
I got off the ship yesterday. Back on land. Back toward the ordinary life that will close back over this crossing like water over a stone.
But something came through on this trip that I wasn't expecting. Some questions I'd been running too fast to catch finally caught me. In the Crow's Nest at 7am. In the thermal spa. In a Costco in Southampton, England.
The container worked. Nice sheets and all.
I'll leave you with the question that kept finding me out there on the water — not because I have an answer, but because I think it might be worth sitting with:
Where are you most yourself? Not where you're most productive. Not where you're most impressive. Not where you perform best.
Where are you most yourself.
And if you know the answer — are you building a life anywhere near that place?
Sean from Slow Crossings: Written somewhere between Holland America’s Rotterdam and whatever comes next.