In Walden, Thoreau wrote that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." When I worked for the state, there were a couple of women in my office whose very existence proved a refutation to that statement: they led lives of decidedly noisy desperation. Everyone knew when things went wrong with these ladies' lives. And things were always going wrong with their lives.
I remember thinking, the first time I read that particular quote, how profoundly sad it made me. I read Walden for the first time after finishing my freshman year of college. And it had been a hard year to date. A year where I had felt as though I were leading a life of quiet desperation, despite having a few confidants who knew about my struggles from January to April 2003. Indeed, my blog post of a few days ago was quite the anomaly for me. I'm the sort of person who tends to internalize and then reach a point where some form of expression becomes inevitable.
As a matter of fact, I tend to internalize to such a point that when the expression becomes necessary, the Katie runneth over. So to speak. You know what I mean.
And let me be frank: I prefer quiet desperation to noisy desperation. Or quiet desperation infrequently expressed to select people. Noisy desperation never seems as serious to me. It seems more like a plea for attention than anything else; it's one thing to wear emotions, it's quite another to broadcast them to anyone within hearing range.
If Thoreau's statement is correct, I think it's because people become passive. They let themselves be acted upon and they choose not act; they accept their circumstances in spite of discontent. Their winter of discontent turns into a spring of discontent. And then into a summer and fall of their discontent.
It's so easy to recognize this. Why is it so hard to not fall into that trap?
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