After a recent visit to Walden Pond, I’ve been reading Thoreau’s thoughts on living a deliberate life and they really seem to fit with where I am right now:
[E]verywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. … I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. … Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? …
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. … [T]he laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; … He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
The point that I think Thoreau is driving at is not simply that an obsession with works cuts us off from our deepest natures, but that one can become so focused the minutiae of daily life that we actually lose the ability to discern those desires.
For the last year I have been with the HMT lab at Vanderbilt. I applied to several schools with only a very vague idea of how graduate school worked or what I would like to study. I have wanted to teach for a long time and was very happy to be accepted to the program.
