A Hair's Breadth Aside from Our Usual Path

When I was "stuck", literally for over 10 years, in one of the great
impasses of my life, and felt I could not bring it to a resolution, one
of the best things I finally did was to set a deadline for a choice, and
then go out looking for information or counsel about that choice from
sources and persons I had never consulted before. When I could view and
hear about my life "with fresh senses" by getting outside my usual
patterns of thought and emotion, I could finally decide and act without
debilitating regret about taking one path and leaving another untaken.
Thoreau's journal touches on this today. He is describing our
accustomed attitudes toward winter and challenging his neighbors and
readers to see a hard, cold winter not as a necessary "evil", but as a
functional necessity to which great beauty has been added by "the
artist". He re-framed and gave a new sort of appreciation to his
reality.

from Henry David Thoreau's Journal for December 11, 1856

It (is) only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or
routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. Only
what we have touched and worn is trivial,-our scurf, repetition,
tradition, conformity. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be
inspired.