For all the Thursdays in November, I’m going to pick a Henry David Thoreau quote and post it here, and YOU get to write whatever comes up from that quote.  Start a debate, write a story, agree, disagree, w h a t e v e r.   Post it, comment here, and I promise to come visit you and leave chocolate super-fab, geeky-sexy comment love.

This Thursday’s Thoreau quote: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

(I will edit this post later with my response to the quote, but I don’t want to influence anyone else’s thoughts.)

**Updated to reflect my response 11/13/09

This quote begs the question why, and what can be done about it.  Surely not shattering families to run off to Vaudeville.   Perhaps the why is obvious.  Life happens.  We grow up being taught all the wrong things about what’s important in life, or rather, the teaching, while good intentioned, is skewed, incomplete, and unintentionally backwards.  This is because most people who are teaching children how to have a fulfilling life haven’t figured it out themselves yet.  They’re also getting their information from the media, whose job, let’s face it, is to sell us on things, or the government, whose job is to sell us on OTHER things.  Either way, it’s all about money and material things, even though the desired state of mind are at opposite ends of the spectrum.  One wants you to be hedonistic fulfilling every desirous impulse, while the other wants you to work hard and give back.

So we try to live according to these lessons.  We follow a certain path which we have been told over and over we want.  We must want to go to college, not for the sake of learning, but for our career.  We must want to make as much money as we can.  What we do doesn’t matter, only how much we can make at it.  We must want to get married and have children, it’s the natural order.  We must want to buy a house, a car, televisions, etc.  We must want to like volunteering at our children’s school, and so on.  Yet all of these wants have been implanted by the interests of others.

No wonder we get confused about how to live.  Quiet desperation sets in as we feel the pull from every direction.  It seems everyone wants a piece of us.  Products want us to love them, the government wants us to pay our taxes, our parents want us to make them proud, our spouses/partners want us to like them all the time, our children want us to cut off our right arm and hand it to them.  We hardly get a moment to even think about what WE want, what would make us feel fulfilled, or so we think.  The desperation builds as the yearning grows stronger.  Desperate men do desperate things.

What we need to learn, is balance.  As social animals, we do have responsibilities to our families and our community.  This does not need to trump our deepest inner calling though.  Let’s say you feel called to be an actor, but you’re a Dad.  Running off to Hollywood is impractical, but completely suppressing the call is also impractical because it will either lead to you going to your grave with the song still trapped in you, or you’ll just disappear one day, leaving broken hearts behind you.

So, love your family, pay your taxes, and start a local theater.

With love,