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Today's
quotation:
If people walk in the woods for the love of
them half of each day, they are in danger of being regarded
as loafers; but if they
spend their whole day as speculators, shearing off those woods and making earth
bald before her time, they are esteemed industrious
and
enterprising citizens. As if a town had no interest in
forests but
to cut them down!
Henry David Thoreau
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Today's
Meditation:
Are
you regarded as a loafer? Most of the people I know
who regularly walk for half a day in the woods (and there
aren't very many of them) love what they do, and they
wouldn't care a bit if people called them loafers.
They know that what they're doing is a beautiful way to
practice renewal, to recharge their spirits after
experiencing the stress of their work and their
families. They know that no one's judgment about how
they spend their time is important except their own, for
they know in their hearts what they most need.
It's very easy to allow ourselves to be judged by others, even
though their views often are very flawed. Why do we
worry about what a person thinks of us and what we do,
when we can see quite clearly that that person isn't happy
with him or herself? Why do we put stock in the
opinions of those people who don't even know themselves,
much less us? Don't we know what's best for
us? Then why don't we trust that more than we trust
the views of others?
We
don't have to be producing for the sake of the approval of
others if we want to be happy as human beings. We
don't need to be walking the walk that others define for
us--Thoreau also talked about "marching to the beat
of a different drummer," and while we often quote
that idea, few of us have made a conscious decision to
live fully to the beat of our individual drummer.
It's not easy to do so--it takes courage and commitment to
devote yourself to the life that you feel inside is best
for you. But the rewards are definitely there, even
if we have no true idea of what those rewards look like,
because we've never dared to go down the road at the end
of which they lie.
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