The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

October 16Finding Aliveness

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to humankind, its presence refreshes. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from their labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find themselves in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. They would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

Henry David Thoreau—“Walking” (1861)

Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman advocated the qualities of nature as a requisite aspect of spirituality. They wrote about it in romantic and poetic terms but, seated firmly as they were at the height of the Industrial Revolution, their arguments were seen at the time more as metaphor than movement.

Today, elements of their teachings (preachings) can be found in everything from politics to urban planning. Studies of happiness and even longevity include nods to living in places and environments where there is a dimension of wildness or aliveness.

What the heck; maybe we're not meant to eat food created in a lab, or perhaps sitting all day under artificial lights isn't good for our health. Maybe we need to meet more people face to face, and maybe, just maybe, we need nature to master, as Thoreau described it, “the art of life.”

The life of the typical entrepreneur often suffers today from what Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle, calls “Nature Deficit Disorder”—a way to describe the psychological, ...