People wish to be settled.
It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life
which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Tell me,
what is it you plan to do
with your one wild, precious life?
Mary Oliver
We are born to fulfill a role in this world and then, hopefully, leave the world better than it was before we took our few precious breaths and then departed. Sometimes, we are thrust into these roles; sometimes, we fail to listen to our heart; and, sometimes, we flow with the river around us because it demands so little.
But the day comes when, as Mary Oliver writes in "The Journey":
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
As for me, I am looking for the stars... What about you?
