The Strokes
One of the best perks of my job is that every year, no matter how many times I teach the same course or grade level, I'm exposed to new material and new insights. For example, this year I'll be teaching Gatsby to my 14th group of 11th-graders, and I'll undoubtedly come across some new gift of Fitzgerald-brilliance I hadn't ever noticed before. While it's exhausting to continually change my syllabus--warranting the creation of at least two new units per year-- I also get to read some of the best books, short stories, and poems in the world. For my job.
I just spent the last half hour reading excerpts from Thoreau's Walden, the inspiring account of the author's two years and two months living in a shack on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. While I've always been a big Thoreau fan, I've been more partial to Emerson for the last ten years of my life, choosing his quotes for e-mail send-offs and wedding cards over any other American transcendentalist's. However, some of the lines from Walden just knocked me off my feet and gave me one of those complete renewals of the human spirit and the vast possibilities readily available to any individual willing to move beyond Safe, Efficient, and Expected. I know my words would never even begin to do Thoreau's justice, so I'll let his wisdom and first-hand experience do the talking...
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."
"Our life is frittered away by details."
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry."
"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!"
"...if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them..."
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise."
I do my best to appreciate this life and do things that scare me, but as everyone knows, it's more difficult in practice than it is on paper. It's hard to go against society's expectations; to risk being judged and looking foolish. Thoreau said: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and I don't doubt that. So many people spend their days caught in a web of worry and mistrust; uncertainty and envy. I see the people I quietly observe, in awe and respect, in this life: The ones who speak their minds even if the response isn't desirable. The ones who work hard--patiently, diligently-- for something they care about, even though the reward and recognition is non-existent. The ones who adopt older animals from the humane society. The ones who fight, every day, for the rights of people and things that matter. The ones who go to restaurants alone because the food's supposed to be good. The ones who travel to unknown places, even if they don't have the money to afford it and they don't quite know where they'll stay when they get there. The ones who swim out, by themselves--at dusk!--because the sunset's just better at the buoy line. The ones who don't worry--better yet, don't care--about the newest designer jeans or the most expensive jewelry. The ones who take the road less traveled not because they're loud, proclaimed "NON-CONFORMISTS!" and they're actively resisting social norms, but because they have an earnest desire to observe and experience where it leads. The ones who, above all else, put the voices of their hearts above the opinions and recommendations of others--which is, in my mind, one of the bravest and most important, yet also the most difficult, things we can do as individuals.
So here's to 2011. To Henry David Thoreau. Individuality. A complete and utter avoidance of a life full of "quiet desperation."
Onward and upward...
