Henry David Thoreau was about 27 years old when he moved to Walden Pond in 1845. He stayed there a little over two years.

I’ve been to that spot in Massachusetts. I’ve stepped into the one room cabin on Walden Pond and have seen the view he saw, the woods he walked in.  

I think people often imagine Thoreau escaping life. But research shows that he was actually trying to understand it.

He was neither a teenager running off into the wilderness nor a grown man walking away from his life. He was a young adult in a period of uncertainty. He had graduated from Harvard, tried teaching, tried other work, struggled to establish himself as a writer, lost his beloved brother John a few years earlier, and was trying to figure out how he wanted to live.

Walden was partly a philosophical experiment and partly a search for clarity. He wanted to strip life down to its essentials and see what remained.

So he went into relative solitude trying to figure out who he was. He found some perspective through stillness. He entered the woods and saw himself more clearly.

I, too, had an emerging-adulthood season where the future wasn’t fully formed yet.

I was midway through my sophomore year in college. My friends were choosing missions and marriage and locations for studying abroad. 

I chose a serendipitous (or divinipitous, as my dad would say) opportunity that fell into my lap: a live-in nanny position for a family with a three year old daughter living in Brooklyn, New York.

Unlike Mr. Thoreau, I went into one of the busiest places in the world while trying to figure out who I was. I found perspective through the sheer scale of New York City. I entered that city full of millions of lives and somehow saw myself more clearly.

New York became the backdrop for several important firsts:

• The first time I lived far away from my family.
• The first time I built a life from scratch.
• The first time I found “my people” without the help of school, family, church, or familiar structures.
• The first time I discovered that homesickness eventually passes.
• The first time I learned I could navigate a huge, intimidating world and eventually feel comfortable in it.

Those months became my proof-of-concept version of adulthood.

I just returned last night from a trip to New York. My 5th trip back since living there. Those trips always contain specific things for me: Perspective, Possibility, Competence, Memory, Belonging. Every time I’m there, I feel what I felt in that grimy, dirty, beautiful, magnificent city as someone 20 years old who was just figuring things out.

This morning I thought of Mr. Thoreau. 

He wrote:

“I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.

This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging – though invisible – companion, and walked with him.”

I think those words about being in nature resonate with a lot of people. A LOT. (I even have a nephew named Henry David.)

My version of his sentiment would be this:

“I come out to this city, where the problem of existence is expanded. I leave behind my familiar routines and find myself among crowded sidewalks, subway tunnels, brownstones, street vendors, and millions of lives unfolding at once. I turn a corner, emerge from a station, or catch sight of a skyline at dusk, and it is as if I have come to an open window. I see out and around myself.

The things that seemed so large at home settle back into their proper proportions. My own story becomes one among countless others. The future feels bigger. Possibility feels closer. I remember that the world is wide and that people are endlessly building, changing, trying, beginning again.

This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always meet there with the younger, braver, more hopeful version of myself – still walking those streets, still figuring things out, still discovering who she might become. And for a little while, I walk with her.”

Whether your version of remembering yourself is in the mountains, a city, an ocean, or somewhere in the wide open countryside, I hope you set aside time and resources to return there once in a while.

I can’t wait to hear about the places that have become landmarks in your own story. And if you’d like help remembering who you are, what you’ve learned, and what you’re capable of, I’d love to help.

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