“… a too rambling habit of
mind.”
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch
As I grow into the good years of
seniorhood, I want, almost more than anything else, to further develop and
fine-tune my “rambling habit of mind”, a quality largely criticized by Eliot’s
residents of Middlemarch. I want to think like Mr. Brooke thought, with a
thoroughly unrestricted spirit and a risk-taking heart. I want my thoughts to
be fliers and racers and swimmers, shooting off in different directions, doing
the dangerous and unbridled things that thoughts are supposed to do.
Thoughts should have no weights to weigh them down, no nooses around their
necks, no fences to force them into small and petty places. Thoughts are as old
as stars and as wild as winds among mountains, and I want to wish mine the best
as they sightsee in the land of elderly, enlightened thinking. My mind has
always liked a bit of rambling - some occasional unobstructed, purposeless strolling
among the millions of thoughts that throng all of us in this universe – and I
mean to make it a habit in these white-haired, light-hearted, happy-go-lucky
years.
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