The Great Escape
How we learn to think differently
One of the great dichotomies of life is that the world wants and needs people who can think for themselves yet attempts to have everyone think the same way. In our day-to-day lives, we are fed stories and narratives about how the world works, how we’re supposed to act, think, and feel. We are told what type of career we should have, what type of house we should live in, and how we should raise our children.
Yet, the more we listen to the narratives of everyday life, the less we are able to build our own narratives and think outside the box. The less we can think for ourselves, the less free we are and in turn will continue to push the narratives and stories we ourselves have been forced to ingest.
Back in the 1800s, Henry David Thoreau too experienced this dilemma and wanted to escape. He had wanted to write but knew he could not properly focus and write from himself alone if he continued living his existence in the bustling world of his time.
The poet Ellery Channing said to Thoreau:
“Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”
Thoreau took the advice after dissatisfaction and restlessness with his life, and moved to a plot of land on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property where he built a small cabin. He would eventually write:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
Thoreau would spend the next two years of his life here working on his writing and learning to think for himself. From the experience would come Walden, one of the most famous works in literature.
In order to think differently, in order to be a contrarian, one must think differently, not out of difference for difference's sake but because they view the world with completely new eyes. The glasses they once wore, the glasses everyone wears, are removed and replaced with their own. The world is then digested through the lens of a different perspective, one built by the individual and not strictly by society around them.
"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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Life has become harder and harder to uproot and move to nature and be with one’s thoughts. But yet there is something within us that calls us to return to it, and when we do, we are blessed with the understanding that there are bigger things in the world than what we deal with in our day-to-day lives.
To think differently means to learn to step outside of our everyday existence and to see the world differently. One does not necessarily need to move to nature to do this. Rather, by remembering the vastness of the world, and the depth it holds, by holding onto a spark of curiosity, we have the ability to learn to think differently. From within us springs forth new light and new depth, not because we go against the grain for the sake of being different, but because we have taken our own experiences and molded them with new ones in ways that no one else could. We are unique all to ourselves and it is through leaning into that uniqueness that we begin to see the world through our own glasses and not the ones the world tells us to wear.
“In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.”
To live simply and wisely in today’s world does not mean we need to give up our possessions and move to nature, rather, it is about the pursuit of knowledge and the ability to step outside oneself in the decisions we make. The more we can remember the depth life provides, the more we can see the world differently and in turn learn to think for ourselves.
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo