Most people know that we must follow our divine path. However, there are moments when, listening to other people’s story, we grow weary of our path. We live constantly watching the lives of other people. One must learn to live devoted to his own life. Although this knowledge sits within my mind I collapsed from the fear of never achieving freedom. I laid on my bed unable to move. Movement seemed pointless. I felt condemned to a life of anonymity.
I wanted to die. So I laid down and allowed myself to feel every emotion. I’ve learned that the desire for death may feel physical, but its metaphorical. It is symbolical, and we must continue to remake ourselves in the face of obscurity. I sat on that bed and began to think about death. I thought about the parts of me that need to die. The delusion. The doubt. The assumption the world revolves around me. I’ve known those parts for so long. We often forget our constant changing while our minds remain tied to old images of the self. Henry David Thoreau spoke on the need to follow our divinity, and death being the precursor to change saying:
We are ever dying to one world and being born into another. I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.
We must break through paralyses in order to change. Laying on that bed my body suffered from rigor-mortis. I lost all faith in change, spontaneity, and divinity. We must create a new definition of adversity. Anyone that aims to become a hero must fight through the paralyses and doubt. The courage to stake our lives on the image resting within our mind. This presence can only be achieved through following our divinity. A purpose gives our suffering meaning, for we believe something will come out of it. A life without a purpose cannot be escaped, and our internal condition determines the outcome of our lives. Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy. Henry David Thoreau speaks about following your divinity as an act of colonizing old parts of ourselves. Committing ourselves to the discovery of new land saying:
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice… It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, than it is to explore the private sea of one’s being.
I had prayed to God. I meditated on freedom, and committed myself, mentally, to becoming a man. The masturbation and stress eating continued. We can only be sure we’ve gained wisdom through the acting on what we claim to know. Our addictions are never on the surface but are formed from a deep desire and lack. On that bed I learned that my addictions came from the desire to be held. To be understood, wanted, and accepted totality.
The stress eating is the outcome of fear, and food being the only thing I can control. We cover up the real reasons for our addictions. Creating false stories to cover up the real reason we act out of all this pain. However, I’ve learned we only reveal what we are willing to face. Although life may be difficult, painful, and our lives seem to pass us by we must believe. We can only have faith in following our divine path. Henry David Thoreau speaks on the importance of our divine path saying:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.
There you have it; Thoreau’s guide to following your dreams. 1. Create distance between yourself and culture through self-reflection. 2. March in the direction of your dreams. 3. Be resilient, live deeply.
Complement Henry David Thoreau On Death with his insistence on reflection, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s spirituality of nature, Thomas Aquinas on the meaning of life, and an early 20th-century Dominican guide to discovering and living your vocation.
These letters make it plain that he could in fact be a warm and attentive friend. Letters to a spiritual seeker shows Henry David Thoreau insightfulness on death and love. Follow this essay up with Henry Millers opinions of the purpose of marriage.
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