The next Adventure, or the next Resting Place?

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after" --Thoreau.

As life speeds around me, as I continue to fish for new accounts, I hear John Denver in the background, finding life in "the graceful way of flowers in the wind"

I will turn 60 this year, and I don't really know if I can slow down, or if I truly want to. But, there is always that soft breeze blowing, something whispering, something lightly beckoning me. I have heard these voices all my life, from Thoreau, to Whitman, to John Denver. I have seen the mountains, the oceans, and the beauty of a simple flower. And for that moment, I want to surrender.

Then I think of Ulysses. In the Odyssey, Ulysses forcibly takes his men back to the ship after they landed on the island of the lotus eaters, where his men, after eating lotus, wanted "long rest...or dreamful ease" (Tennyson). In the end, as an old man, in Tennyson's poem, Ulysses says, "I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees..."

I love the thought of rest, I love to listen to John Denver, but I am much more like Ulysses. I have too many adventures left to permanently rest, too many opportunities to learn, to grow, to run the race.

And so, in the end, my thoughts echo Tennyson when Ulysses muses about "how dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish'd not shine with use" And while I, like the character in Frost's poem, can take a little time to watch the woods fill up with snow, I too have "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep"