The thoughts of some people are constant, but of others varying and contradictory. It is like landscape. Some live their lives in the sight of a great range of mountains—they live in the presence of certain ever-abiding thoughts; others change their mental scenery from day to day, in the shallows and flats of the low country. But we all have our epochal days, our epochal thoughts. We turn to a page in our notebook and say: “On this day the thought occurred to me in the light of which I have lived ever since.” You draw two candles there, with light rays, to show the thought of the year.
It is much the same if the expression of the thought has been given you by another. Your thought of the year may take the form of a quotation. Those who search while they read naturally find in the expression of others what their souls need. I remember long periods of living with certain thoughts derived from books—Browning’s:
He placed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance
This present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest.
and then at another time Richter’s:
“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”
Persistent thoughts on a path of life’s pilgrimage! Morning after morning one awakens and the thought awakens with one and goes through the day in company, in communion with one.
Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. “Oh child, do you see yourself to-day?”
We look, we look, and answer wistfully, “Not to-day, not to-day.”