Gandalf to Bilbo - "I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging and it's very difficult to find anyone."

"I should think so - in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anyone sees in them."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The path of living life on your own terms is not the easy path. It is the path of deep satisfaction, the path of harmony with yourself and your interior world. But it is often hard. Life is hard, regardless of the path you select. Every path has its price.

But most people would rather avoid risk. You get banged up from time-to-time living life on your own terms. You fail. You get yourself up and brush yourself off and start all over again.

So the Seventh Law of living life on your own terms: However simple, make your home a place of beauty, a refuge against the world.

You need a sanctuary on this path. My thought is create your home with simple, beautiful things. Handmade things. Things someone poured their soul into during the process of creation. Handmade things made with love. Make a home that celebrates natural things and natural beauty, artistic beauty.

Simplicity is important, at least to me. I like sparseness. You may like bric-a-brac. More power to you. I have a collection of arrowheads and scrapers that I’ve found in the woods or that friends have given me. To others, the relics of ancient peoples are probably bric-a-brac.

Each to his own, but we need, on this path towards our soul, a refuge where we can go to restore our energy. Where we surround ourselves with things that are, to us, sacred. Where we recuperate from life’s bangs, which are inevitable.

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce my baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love with simple things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in the woods, a hut on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me. They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a false standard of beauty, they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winter and summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, and the longer he will live. . .
-       John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature

The excerpt above is from my upcoming book, “The 45 Laws Of Living Life On Your Own Terms”. It’s a first draft. It will evolve.