With this new section, I aim to more deliberately share quotes from books I love and/or am currently reading. There’s so much deep, rich, and powerful wisdom to be mined in books great and small—yet when I scroll social media, I find it full of bland quotes and snappy memes. I want to share instead some of literature’s thunderclaps that have knocked me down and changed me.
Here’s one, for example, from my favorite essay—Emerson’s “Self-reliance”:
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
It is the harder, becuase you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great [person] is [one] who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
This is how I want to live—with self-aware, mindful choosing even when I’m in the presence of other people.
This section, then, will act as a sort of virtual “commonplace book”—the notebooks people kept in olden times for jotting down quotes and thoughts from their reading. To keep with my water theme and also for the sense of an ongoing flow, it’s called “Commonplace Brook.” (I actually walked out to a nearby creek this evening to take the above photo with my current journal-notebook and Jane Eyre.)
I aim to share the posts on social media as well, like I do with my “Serenity Splashes”—often pairing them with selections from my huge backstock of lovely nature photos I’ve taken, to add even more goodness!