Think about how you are spending your life. Also about how you have already spent a large part of your life. And why you are spending your life the way your are.
Robert Frost loved New England, and he wrote about it profusely in his poetry. He wrote abut going to clean out a pasture spring so the cows could drink, about swinging on birches, and also about snow on the trees in winter, but one of the most though provoking poems he ever wrote was about two roads that converged in a yellow wood and how he decided to take the one less traveled.
It occurred to me just how few people take that road. Stands to reason that is why it's called the road less traveled. The herd instinct is strong among humans, very few of us tend to be mavericks. And the ones that are, often are rounded up and forced back into the herd. Humans, by nature, go with the flow. If we step outside that flow and offer thoughts or ideas that are different or at times even revolutionary, someone is usually there to slap us back into line. Good case in point was Galileo. He knew he was right, yet he was forced to recant at the very threat to his life. Time proved in his favor, but what good did it do him. By that point he was dead. Another case was Sir Issac Newton. One of the great minds of all times, yet he kept his work secret because of fear of how he would be treated if he published it. And Newton couldn't stand criticism. He also knew he was right, but because of his reluctance to accept the smirks and jeers of his fellow scientist, he kept quite.
Which brings me back to the subject of thinking. Just thinking. I've come to the conclusion that the majority of people do not think for themselves. They are told by others what they should wear, eat, where they should live and for the most part what they should think. I remember in the seventy when the layered look became fashionable. We had the layer look for years at home. It consisted of putting on just about all the clothes we owned in order to keep warm in the winter. Then suddenly some fashion guru somewhere, heaven knows where, decided it was just the way everyone ought to dress. The days of the well ordered wardrobe were passe. And just about the time I finally got to the point where I had enough resources to afford one. I have found in my life I have usually been about a decade behind the rest of the world when it comes to fashion. And at this point in my life I have decided 'who cares'.
So I have decided I will go home and try to put in practice all the great lessons I've learned from my week in the New England woods of Northern Vermont. I will be Robert Frost and think and do what I like. And I will go home with that resolve, hoping this mind set will last more than a couple of weeks or a month at the most; hoping I don't end up falling back into the old mindset. Hoping my circumstances in life will not sap the adventure and sense of wonder from me, and that I will not look around one day and find myself on the same road traveled by so many., And if this should be the case, here's hoping my circumstances will once again allow me to set off for the woods. And think, and think, and think.
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