Subdued, Not Profitless, Walks

Thoreau's journal from January 27--our contemporary separated from us by only 150 years or so...

When you think that your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself (to go on--ed.), it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open.

Though we favor quick successes, and many of them, and want certainty about our personal life-plans these days, I agree with Mr. Thoreau that there is often wisdom to a journey that is, as another philosopher says,"a long faithfulness in one direction." Were we to turn back, or to change course, each time we met an obstacle, a disappointment, or suffering, or even each time that we had a new and enthusiastic thought or dream about how things could be, there is no guarantee that we would finally "get" anywhere that fidelity to a single, good path wouldn't have taken us in the first place. One Christian writer warns that the Devil just loves to see us launch out on new ventures without really completing any that we have previously begun. This is why the monastics advocate the virtue of stability.

I flinch in my soul every time I hear someone explaining to their friends that it seems that God has called them away to a new cause, a new church, a new community, a new love, etc. Far more interesting to my mind are those who remain where they are, and figure out how to renew themselves on the same old walk they've been taking. I just led a funeral this week for a Northfield United Methodist church-man, a rare man in these times because he lived his entire life, and raised his own family, in the same farmhouse and on the same five acres, which his father first made their home. This man was a bee-keeper and truck-farmer all his days, just as his father was before him. I never heard him say that his life and walk were unprofitable just because they ended in the same house where they began. I would say he felt that Nature confirmed the value of his walk with each jar of honey he and the bees harvested.