First Step of a Thousand-Mile Journey

This blog is inspired by Henry David Thoreau, who was willing not only to try something new in his life, but also to share his experiences with others.  If Thoreau were alive today, he’d probably be a blogging eco-tourist and an opinionated activist. 

In some sense, everything I’ve done in my adult life has sprung from two passages in Walden.  First, when beginning his back-to-basics experiment, Thoreau wrote:

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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion (Walden, Chapter 1).

After two years in the woods, Thoreau concluded:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them (Chapter 18).

This blog is both a record of my attempt to live deliberately, and an attempt to put foundations under my desire to be a disciplined thinker and writer.