I often wonder what might have been, had I chosen that other path. The road that I did not take.
But I didn’t….
So as much as I might wonder, I return to the path that I did take… and here I find myself with the reality that my choices have created.
But I never forget that I died to become the man I am today. Those choices – my choices – dictate the reality that I see before me.
I just hope that I’ve made the right choices.
This morning, for me, life is all about Wild Berry Zinger and a backlog of e-mail that seems to never end. Back to the grind.
Red Sox win – series is 2-2. Woot!
About two hours south of Bangor, Maine on I-95 and then just a bit to the east along Maine Route 196 lies the small town of Brunswick, Maine, the home of Bowdoin College.
In 1861, a young man, at the time a professor at the college, used some sneaky tricks to get himself on leave from the college and became an Army officer in the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment.
Not two years later, it was the same young man, at the time a Lt. Colonel, who held the line on the Union’s flank on a hill called Little Round Top near another small town called Gettysburg.
When the war was over, he was a Major General and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In Maine, they know him as the long-time President of Bowdoin College, where upon retirement, he had taught nearly every subject available to teach – and as a twice governor of that state.
Today, for a few brief moments, I paid him my respects.
The path today took me south of Bangor down Route 1A to Coastal Route 1 through scenic places like Winterport, Belfast, Glen Cove, and then to Rockland on the Maine Midcoast.
After a day at the Wyeth Center and the Farnsworth Art Museum, punctuated by a wonderful lunch at the Market on Maine, it was word of the boardwalk at the harbor that led to this point.
And that was the view for more than two hours as my tired soul occupied a bench and read quietly – the only sound that of the wind and of the seagulls.
Tomorrow, I finally get to pay my respects to an old friend of mine. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, as I head south towards home, through Brunswick and Bath.
It’s no accident that we all be nestled togther in the curves of the universe. We are tugged by the forces of celestial tides.
Time folds in on itself and outward again in gladless as we spin around, each of us an utter miracle in a seal of tiny white stars. [Jamien E. Morehouse – 1999]
With thanks to Doc Searls for the original post.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmostãand our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another…
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.