Make A Path

Hello Friends,

Hope everyone is doing well. Since I started thinking about these quotes I've been reading a lot more. Once you start fueling the mind with positive thoughts, the mind craves more. New thoughts are being born.

In high school I very much into sports. For as long as I could remember I wanted to be in the NBA. My teachers as well as my parents would always remind me that I needed to exercise my mind as well as my body. Of course at the time all I wanted to do was play.

As I look at it now, I understand what they were saying. Just like your body, you must exercise the mind. Reading is a good way to do that. Reading others ideas leads to your own personal thoughts about what the author is talking about. I came across a quote from one of the authors I had to read in high school. Todays quote comes from Henry David Thoreau.

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."

Thoreau was thought to be very controversial for his time. He was alive during the times of slavery in the United States. He was an abolitionist, which meant that he was against slavery, which meant he was against the government, which meant anything he said came under great scrutiny.

He wrote an essay called "Civil Disobedience." In it he questioned the role of the government on societies life. He said, "...we should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences..." Another words, we cannot let the government tell us what to believe and how the act. We have to know how to think for ourselves and realize when something is wrong, and be willing to do something about it.

Thoreau advises us to be constantly thinking. We need to nurture our thoughts. Just as a "single step" won't get us to our destination, a "single thought" won't change anything. When we begin to think more and share our thoughts with others that is when growth begins. If Thoreau had only thought once that slavery was wrong, nothing would have happened. But because he thought about this constantly and shared his ideas with others and and they shared those ideas with others and so on, he was able to be a part of a movement that led to the end of slavery as they knew it.

So keep walking. Keep thinking. Keep living. Tell me what you think...In Your Own Words.

Thanks for listening.