Northumbria Walking Forums

[Hillwalker]

For me, the first and the last two sentences of this short extract have the most relevance, are the most pertinent.

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there; perhaps it seemed to me I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the path which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the roots of tradition and comformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go befoe the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life that he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundry; new universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licence of a higher order of beings. In proportion, as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work may not be lost, that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Henry David Thoreau

Walden: or, Life in the Woods

Elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau writes "Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?" I used to ask the same question, but then I am older now, and wiser - I like to think!