“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
For the past week, I’ve been living in my childhood bedroom as I transition to a new apartment. I love glancing at the bookcase in the corner and seeing a snapshot of my past life — the books, photos, and knickknacks of a senior at St. Thomas Aquinas High School.
As I glanced through the book titles, I felt drawn to pull out Self-Reliance & Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and browse through it. I smiled as I saw the many underlines, highlights, and questions that a younger me had placed studiously throughout the text. That’s when I came across the quote above, that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members”. If this rang true for Emerson while living in solitude in the woods way back in 1841, how much more does it resound to us today? I instantly felt a twinge of guilt, a sign that I may not be living with integrity.
In what ways have each of us tuned out our own ideas and intuition and replaced them with the opinions and agendas of other people?
How have we dismissed pursuing our own dreams and creating our own standards and embraced the unforgiving, dehumanizing depictions of humanity that flow through our phones and media?
The wisdom within this quote made me realize how often I have plugged into the opinions of others while taking so little time, comparatively, to sit with my own thoughts, feelings, and intuition. For example, in just the past week, I’ve listened to over seven hours of political commentary podcasts, soaking in the viewpoints of others while on a walk or driving to yoga. What do I really believe? What do I care about? What are the better questions that I can ask? I’m sure you’ve found yourself scrolling through your feeds ready to lash out or like something in a moment’s notice. At a gut and soul level, this way of being feels hollow.
There are two things that I deeply dislike – mediocrity and conformity. They stand in stark contrast with my loves of excellence and individuality. And yet, I must take responsibility for the ways in which I have made myself susceptible to both mediocrity and conformity. For in not actively cultivating excellence and individuality, I make it easy for these non-virtues to creep into my daily life.
So what to do now that this wisdom has struck such a chord within my soul?
The quest seems simple, though not easy. I desire to cultivate a period of time where I tune back into my intuition and inner wisdom by tuning out the influences of society. Specifically, for the month of July, I will eschew my daily podcast routine and stop visiting my news sites. I will read, write, walk, play, create, rest, and just be. I will pay attention to what is coming from within by turning down the volume on the noise from the outside.
And from this period of solitude and deep listening, I will be able to live like the great individuals who exist in the world, deeply connected, and and hold true to their core sense of being, deeply at peace.
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance