One World at a Time
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
-- Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
In Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, a young woman named Emily who has died in childbirth is given a chance to relive a single day of her life. Despite warnings from other departed spirits that life is too painful to experience again from beyond the grave, Emily chooses to go back on her 12th birthday. She quickly realizes she has made a mistake. She finds that people are so preoccupied with the humdrum of everyday life that they fail to appreciate how precious every moment is. "It goes by so fast," she cries. "We don't have time to look at one another." She sadly concludes that life is wasted on the living and returns to her grave. "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize," she says. "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?"
The story of our life is that we become so preoccupied with what happens next or what has already happened that we are oblivious to what is happening right now. Henry Thoreau set out to live his life deliberately, vowing that he would not reach the end and discover he had not lived it. He was a famous loafer, able to sit by the hour at the door of his little cabin in the woods and watch life unfold before him. "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."
"Do you have eyes, and fail to see?" Jesus said, rebuking his disciples. He was not criticizing them for failing to see beyond the obvious; quite the reverse, they failed to see what was under their noses. The kingdom of God is not hidden from our sight. It is reality, and it stares us in the face all the time. The trouble is, we think we see, but all we see is what we think. We lead humdrum lives not because life is humdrum but because our thoughts are humdrum, and we can't see past them.
Even on his death bed, Thoreau refused to look beyond the present or to hope for the future. A few days before he died of consumption at age 44, he was visited by Parker Pillsbury, a family friend and former clergyman. "You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you," Pillsbury said. Thoreau, whose religious views were heterodox, to say the least, remained true to himself to the end. "One world at a time," he replied tartly.
Henry Thoreau, Walden
Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
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