LONELY ROAD?

_lola.e
_lola.e
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Life placed before me two roads; the high road and the other road. I didn’t know the high road and all I knew of the other road was that it could be rowdy and loud and depressing, so I chose the high road. The high road proved more challenging. It was neither a sad nor depressed road to take, but it was a lonely road. It was the road of the non-conformist. It was the road of a Man Thinking and not a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking. It was the road that I would choose over again, if I had to.

On that road I came across Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on ‘Self Reliance’ and ‘The American Scholar’ and it affirmed to me all over again that I had chosen right. It affirmed my desire to tread that path daily irrespective of the fact that it was a road less trodden. God would not have his work made manifest by cowards; this displayed the truth behind the courage in my decision to tread that path. It gave me a motto to live my life by; it gave me the illumination that led me to many open doors.

On that road I met people like you. People who had the courage to do what they wanted to do and not what the society expected them to do; people who flew unencumbered by fear and unchained by mediocrity; people who gave their all without the fear of being labeled too much; people who knew that fear was a thing born from ignorance; people who did their very best; people who were not a lesser expression of themselves; people who could and they did. I was not ashamed to admit that I found your type very interesting in a rare way. You could show up and be whoever you wanted to be at anytime. You could be a lover, a writer, a confidante, an advocate, a friend, an adviser, a playmate, a strategist, a singer and more whenever you wanted. You were many people in one person. Wasn’t that what Emerson called a scholar; man who could be many things without losing himself at any point?

On that road I found out that being alone was totally alien to loneliness. That road thrived on the former. To tread the high road you had to be ready to leave everything to gain everything. You had to be like a baby; infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it. You had to be you, deliberate. When I found that out, I realized that your brightness was overbearing in a terrific way. I enjoyed basking in its glow, but it extinguished mine. It stifled mine. It made mine hide like a snail in its shell receding every time it came in contact with anything. It wasn’t that we couldn’t glow together. It was that I was half-expressing myself with you. And for me to fully maximize the advantage of taking the high road, I had to leave you and not be ashamed of that divine idea which I represented. You were not bad for me. You were only right at the wrong time.

The high road was not a lonely road. It was a road that must be trodden with a certain level of guts. Guts gained from the fact that your heart vibrated to an iron string called genius. It meant for you that there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.



For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road…



*Words in italics are from the essays on ‘Self Reliance’ and ‘The American Scholar’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    _lola.e

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    _lola.e

    Ars longa vita brevis

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