Most of our lives we only think we’re thinking. In truth, our likes, dislikes, choices are dictated by our moment and tribe. Like Good King Wenceslas’ page,

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.

We may think we’ve chosen to follow a parent, teacher, mentor, but is that really a choice? Later our road directs our route. In tastes, we tend to mirror our friends’; few relish the ostracism of dissidence. Privately we may demur, but why rock the boat?

                  When one retires, parent, teacher, mentor, boss, neighbors evanesce. Fewer care what we think for our thoughts threaten fewer. That old coot can think what he likes, what difference? We’ve more time to ponder – and curiosity, perhaps, about the import of our arc. Reading a poem now, I don’t feel the glower of received opinion nudging me toward my professors. Were Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake great literature, notwithstanding their obstinate inscrutability? Well, if you say so.

                  Now I consult none when responding to experience. No expectations dog me. I defend no thesis or reputation. No warm footsteps help me through the blizzard, no mentors steer. I am now Wenceslas, finding my way.

                  We may not realize how rigidly we followed. I rebelled from my father – so I thought. Yet for my first 47 years, I did what he’d done, published a suburban newspaper, sat on local boards, played tennis at the country club, etc. I dressed differently but that is fashion not invention. I wrote better, I’m pretty sure, but if true, that was luck. Like my poor timid dad, I hid manuscripts in locked cabinets, unwilling to confess authorship.

                  When he died – age 47 – my direction vanished. Now I could be… let’s see, more the person I had in mind. But who was that? It’s one thing to want to be a distinctive self, another to know with certainty who that self should be. Teenagers think they’re original dying their hair purple when they’re only leaning into a new consensus.

                  I would be … a writer – no longer in hiding – but a writer of what? Few vocations attract more aspirants ignorant of their motives. I sought swashbuckling adventures – easy enough to envision but rife with risk. I longed to love.

                  I fumbled toward a revised me, clawed a new creed from experience. By writing I learned to write; by writing to read. The Cantos and Finnegans Wake ceased to be sacred monuments and became, for me, monomaniacal misfires. Now I could read an unfamiliar poem and say what I saw, populate my private pantheon of predecessors.

                  It’s work, making up one’s own mind. It takes practice. One must try on opinions for fit and comfort, poke them for durability. Astonished I encountered the immensity I would never know; about my few certainties, I grew less certain. I commenced these daily outings – more than a dozen years ago now – adjusting my presentation to the discipline of your attention. If my opinions echoed others’, as opinions will, concurrence was accidental, not sycophantic.

                  Seeing anew renews the world. There can never be “same old” if you open your eyes. I’ve never “been there, done that,” for the person who was there has been altered. Nowadays I’m far happier waking than, when working, I knotted my tie like a noose. My mind will never be mine to make – our moment makes us – but it’s more mine than before.

                  That feels grand.