I keep reading books from the 19th century and earlier, fiction and nonfiction, because I envy something about the lives of the people in them.
I don’t think I’d want to trade places. I’m too accustomed to hot showers and modern dentistry. But people back then seemed to live with a certain straightforwardness we no longer have. They could more easily just do a thing, more easily pick a course of action and see it through.
Now I think I know why: regardless of their class, those people had relatively few options in every area of life. There were fewer things they could do, fewer things they wanted to do, and fewer things to think about. Naturally, whenever they made a choice, they acted on it with more care and conviction, with relatively little to distract them from it.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
For me, it was always cleaning the clutter / tidying up the house before a long trip away from home. Coming back to less chaos was such a comfort.