Broadening.

"To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery." This sentiment at the very end of Walden carries such gravity to me personally because there was nothing I thought of more while I was living in New York. No matter how hard we try and think positively, sometimes uplifting ourselves is out of our control when we are in an environment we deem suffocating and unfit for us. Thoreau felt a similar sense of disgust for his environment and the over indulgence and blind acceptance he witnessed so prevalently around him. This is why he retreated to an atmosphere where it is absolutely essential to get to know your surroundings and think critically about everything in order to live adequately.

Thoreau exclaims, "Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here." It's truly ridiculous when people assume that the rest of the world is like the small cocoon in which they live. I admire the fact that Thoreau receives such excitement from the very prospect of exploration, let alone, physically going out to expand his horizons in unknown environments. He explains how we subconsciously set up boundaries in which we confine ourselves within our minds which are physically manifested through stone walls guarding our farms and rail-fences against our property. He maintains that this is the most pervasive tragedy. He says that "the universe is wider than our views of it," and therefore it is up to us to allow ourselves to continually expand our views. It is the only way to view the world holistically and not narrowly. Lines like these make me think of my seventh grade year during which I wrote a speech on introspection. My closing line was, "if you don't introspect you will still survive, but if you do introspect you will truly thrive."