Breathe After My Own Fashion

I like yesterday’s quote from Henry David Thoreau so much I want to dig a bit deeper into it today.

But before I get to that, a bit more from Throreau:

“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.”

Get focused on death, you’ll forget to live.

Thoughts like these take me back to years ago when I left on my motorcycle journey. The smells of the road still linger, things you ignore from a car, plane, or train. Especially in the morning or at dusk, the smell of dew on the grass, a setting sun and fresh rain. It is alive, you don’t need or want to be anywhere else in these moments.

“I will breathe after my own fashion.” That is the America spirit, or at least what America should be. It’s a risky ideal, a thin line between selfishness and the daring greatly to the be all that we were created to become.

It’s worth the risk. And if we lose it, we may never get it back.