In “Life without Principle,” Henry David Thoreau describes reading William Howitt's account of the 1850s gold rush in Australia. Thoreau pictures a landscape pockmarked by greed and “foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep,” as the search for mineral wealth sweeps the land.
He then reflects on himself, asking “why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.”
As in much of Thoreau’s work, here he takes a physical, external thing—gold-digging—and applies it to an internal choice. If he’s against exploiting natural resources for wealth, is he instead "digging" into his own potential for internal, spiritual wealth?
Thoreau imagines another kind of path, one focused not on financial gain, but one that may be “solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.”
“Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling,” Thoreau writes. “His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two.”
It’s tempting to hear echoes of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” where two paths diverge, and the traveler takes “the one less traveled by.”
But Thoreau’s framing is even more radical.
Instead of seeing two separate, clearly marked pathways, Thoreau sees merely "a gap in the paling," an opening in a fence, in other words, nearly imperceptible, that could be the seed of opportunity.
Maybe no one else sees it, or if they do, it looks nothing like a path forward.
But what if it was?
If we’re in the habit of thinking all our options are well-lit and clearly marked, and that our forks in the road are obvious, if still challenging, we could be missing something essential.
What if the most authentic paths we have are hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to notice them? What if they look nothing like real pathways from a distance, but upon closer inspection and investigation, turn out to be something after all?
We’ll never know, I’d argue, unless we’re really looking out, all the time, at what’s around us. Looking for gaps in the paling, noticing what others don’t have the time or patience or presence to attend to.
But if we’re following the same road everyone’s on, and we’re not paying deep attention to our landscape, I think we risk staying on a seemingly safe, wide path that might function well at some level, but never quite feels like our own.
The risks of stepping off that path, and on to one that's “solitary and narrow and crooked,” are clear, and they can be frightening. For some travelers, there’s safety in numbers on the well-trod road; for others, a winding solitary backroad through the woods with only the sounds of bird calls and wind brushing through the trees is hard to beat.
There’s no right or wrong path, of course. But there are more obvious ones, and those that are hidden away—routes that will never show themselves the way we might expect.
It’s a bit of a treasure hunt, then, to see where curiosity, wonder, and attention might lead us. To see how many paths we might discover that, from most angles, don’t look like paths at all.
Consider: Where in your life might there be a path to doing something different that you haven't paid much attention to? Are there paths in your life where you could go a different way, even if it doesn't look like much, knowing it might be a truer path of "love and reverence," even if it's not the conventional one?
Last week: Near to the heart