I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
John Burroughs
John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 – March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement. According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress,[citation needed] John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan,[citation needed] Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Burroughs
Lately, many of us are feeling disillusioned, powerless, and frustrated. I suspect this is not unique to the human condition. That generations before have had the same feeling. We are allowing the so-called money and power people to affect our enjoyment of living. We are also allowing the rest of society to affect us. In fact, we are giving OUR power to fully enjoy ourselves over to them when we do this.
Perhaps if we could take responsibility for our own actions; perhaps we set better parameters about our associates and the people we call friends; perhaps we could create a healthy community of like minded people.
Finding full freedom to enjoy ourselves surely won't happen if we don't find a like-minded group. Of course, that is no panacea as we all have our ups and downs. But before we look outside condemning other behaviors, we must look within to ensure we aren't doing the same thing.
It is easy to fall into this trap of over-helping, allowing the co-dependent into our inner circle. In return, we lose ourselves as we are drained of our own life giving force. A simple cost benefit analysis tells the story. We already know what is acceptable. But do we love ourselves enough to want more?
After all, we are the ones we are waiting for.
