Be A Little More Beaver
"A Joyful Outpost", Jordan Peterson and shaping your home
“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” – Epictetus
Winter’s grip has broken, and with its defeat comes the excitement of Spring. I’ve been ruminating on this quite a bit lately. In keeping with the spirit of celebrating warmer days, I want to offer you some thoughts today on the Virtue of Beavers in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One Aaron Bair sent me his book titled A Joyful Outpost, in which Bair unpacks the lifestyle of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver in C.S. Lewis’ classic fairytale. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
Why? Because even in a cruel winter, you can cultivate the spirit of spring anytime and anywhere you call home.
A mini rebellion
In it, Bair reflects on the “outpost of jollity” created by the beavers in a harsh Narnia cursed to endure winter for the foreseeable future. Inside the home, however, a miniature rebellion is taking place against the White Witch and her spell. The Beavers’ home is a place of good stew, fresh fish, sewing, reading, and mood lighting. It’s warm, cozy, cultured, and safe. It’s a refuge in “Enemy Occupied Territory”. Drawing on the words of C.S. Lewis in his tome, Mere Christianity, Bair reminds us that the world around us is beyond our dominion, but that within our own walls, we have a say about all of it.
You can’t decide kings and queens.
You can’t control the weather.
You can’t fix crime and poverty in your zip code with a magic wand.
But you can curate the books on your shelf, the movies beside your TV, the quality of light, and the color of paint in your home (sorry, renters).
“We routinely underestimate the shaping power stories have over us and our children, but are quick to decry actions that are obviously wrong, not understanding the connection between the two. What we fill our homes with eventually finds its way out into the world.”
- Aaron Bair, A Joyful Outpost
That last line hits hard. What we fill our homes with eventually finds its way out into the world. What gets celebrated in those walls will be what your young ones share with their peers, for better or for worse. Beauty. Cruelty. Forgiveness. Abuse. Empathy. Vengefulness.
This is heavy on my mind today, as I’ve been revisiting the hit TV drama Breaking Bad. There’s this kid in season 2 who has grown up in a meth-drug den. He lives atop trash, litter, broken glass, human despair, and violence. He is sweet, but cannot bring himself to speak any words beyond “I’m hungry.”
You’re left at the end of the episode wondering what will become of a child born into that nightmare. What filled that home will find its way out into the world.
Change the ingredients
Geeky Stoics is all about finding wisdom in popular culture that connects with the most important insights from Stoic philosophy. And this is no exception. When Marcus Auelius writes in Meditations, “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength,” the Beavers of Narnia are in keeping with this suggestion.
It is possible to sever your mind from your environment. People do it all the time to protect themselves. We might call it compartmentalization. But when we can shape our environment, we should.
The environment you create will affect the quality of your thoughts. As John Dutton says in Yellowstone, if you want to change the contents of your thoughts and dreams, “change the ingredients.”
Jordan Peterson’s “Beyond Order” offers 12 rules for the good life that I think anyone can find valuable. One of them reminds me a bit of this beaver-like principle.
Rule 8: Try To Make One Room In Your Home As Beautiful as Possible (good breakdown by
if you want to learn more)“Hell is a place of drop ceilings, rusted ventilation grates, and fluorescent lights; the dismal ugliness and dreariness and general depression of spirit that result from these cost-saving features no doubt depresses productivity far more than the cheapest of architectural tricks and the most deadening of light saves money. Everyone looks like a corpse under fluorescents. Penny-wise and pound-foolish indeed.” - Jordan Peterson
Don’t underrate the impact of your environment. Every day, you make subtle choices about what fills your mind and spirit, and that of your family.
I play piano and classical music in the house most mornings as the day is getting started. We always have a Rose or Garden candle burning. Lamps in the house all have warm light. Bookshelves are mostly orderly. The house is cleaned up weekly.
No matter what is going on outside our walls, our home is a joyful outpost of conversation, sweet scents, and thought-provoking stories. Don’t surrender this power to subjectivism or schools of thought that suggest you have no business in curating the home or deciding what’s good and what’s less than good. Don’t be a tyrant, but don't be a bystander to what goes on in the home.
This is your outpost. You’re surrounded by forces beyond your control that care little for your values or the well-being of your family. Build it up with a smile on your face. Be a Beaver.
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations