Transcendentalism Project

Many people make plans to change and improve their lives. What kinds of things do people want to change about themselves? Have you ever resolved to change something in yourself? Were you successful? What challenges did you face?

Thoreau’s Words:

• “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of life?”
• “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
• “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aides, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”
• “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that does not fail.”
• “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand…and keep your accounts on your thumb nail…Simplify, simplify.”


Writer’s Challenge: What changes or improvements would you like to see in your life? Design your own “experiment in living” wherein you will try out new ways of thinking and living as Thoreau did when he moved to the woods. Following are some suggestions for living more “deliberately”:
• Watch TV less, play less video games, spend less time on social media, spend less time on your phone; read and write more.
• Get outside more often; walk, sit quietly in a natural setting, observe your surroundings.

1. Conduct your experiment for at least a week. Select a negative habit that you would like to give up. Describe a positive habit that you could develop in its place.
2. Record your progress in at least four journal entries (each entry should be 100-250 words) over the seven day period. Discuss the challenges, temptations, and triumphs that you experience.
3. Write a final fifth entry on your “experiment in living.” What did you notice about yourself during the experiment? Did your life change at all? If so, how? How could you continue to “live more deliberately” after this week?

This is worth 50 major grade points.