your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts
act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we
see dream children, dream husband, dream wife,
dream job, dream colleagues, dream partners, dream
friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream
future. Without knowing it, we are coloring everything,
putting our spin on it all. While things in the dream
may change and give the illusion of being vivid and
real, it is still a dream we are caught in. But if we take
off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a
little more accurately what is actually here.
Thoreau felt the need to go off on a solitary retreat for
an extended period of time (he stayed two years and
two months at Walden Pond) to do this. "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."
His deepest conviction: "To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts. ... I have never yet met
a man who was quite awake. How could I have
looked him in the face?"
TRY: Asking yourself from time to time, "Am I awake
now?"