Approaching the precipice of Cascade Mountain, one of the towering 46 high peaks of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, I became enraptured by the abundance of sights and sounds, tastes and smells of America’s wide open. Upstate New York and all her glory never ceases to amaze me. She offers an abundance of timeless purity and simplicity in the face of a time crunched, mallet-pounded nervousness which civilization projects. The blue-green mountaintop vista runs across the skyline like watercolor paints drying in the sun. Clouds swirl and elongate, comforting the space they occupy.
In my last summer before ending my college career, I fully understand Henry David Thoreau’s Walden assertion: “I went to the woods because 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.” Even a lamenting Jean Jacques Rousseau’s call for a return to man’s original state of nature, in which so-called “savage” men lived unfettered, solely in favor of personal sustenance and continuity, drives home.
In a seemingly wide open world -- for lack of a better phrase -- the weight of the world bears down on us, breathing down our backs like a pugnacious beast of worry, confusion and decay. I suppose you could say this is the very position I find myself in these days; at the summit of decision, peering downwards at bramble and briar, not quite set to put a hand over my eyes and dislodge my safety and security with one or two steps. I continue to make plans and goals, forever hedging myself and bracing for a fall.
I asked a good friend who had recently graduated if he had suffered the same qualms of trepidation a year prior, if he had been preparing or perhaps couldn’t handle the thought of graduation -- keep it out of sight of mind. He confessed that at last summer’s close, the nearing prospect galvanized him into action; young people need money, plans and time to think. However, the reality of it all is that life itself is never what you think, a harbinger that the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.
In times like these, when we feel pressured and latently fearful, the singular calm I can muster is that all I can do is try. Every morning before we left for school, my father on the front porch would instruct, “Be the best, don’t worry about letter grades. Get an A in trying.” As much as I loathe the truncating adage, “You can’t do everything,” I begrudgingly accept its reality, although I will never admit it (in person). To curtail your mind, to limit the power of trying is futile in the sense that nothing worth pursuing is ever a waste of time. If aspirations ransack your soul and eliminate all blinding moments of ineffectiveness and futility, then there is something to be said.
If one lives deliberately, as intended by Mr. Thoreau, I contest there is no way that. at the end of life, you will uncover an unlived existence. We need a blend of practicality and dreaminess, and while too much of one may erode the other, there is definitely a side of the coin that I prefer.
