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Joseph Ebron

Mrs. Field

LNG 405

18 October 2010

How Transcendental Are You

I never walk without a destination at mind due to the fact that my determination is driven

by the reaching of a final goal. The path of walking from one destination to another symbolizes

my mindset of rational everyday thinking, in which I set daily goals for me to reach. My

personality as a driven individual gives me no desire to go out into the world without anything to

look forward to accomplishing. For example, for an entire summer I awoke early in the morning

in order to travel on foot to school so that I could train for football. My goal for those walks

wasn’t to just travel to school, but to prepare for football and grow into a better individual

through hard work. That final goal gave my engine the fuel it needed to travel day-by-day even

when I wanted to give up. Personally, without destinations to reach, I find many paths pointless.

On the contrary, Ralph Waldo Emerson showed his love for walking through paths with

no particular destination throughout Nature. Nature expresses Emerson’s adventurous attitudes

through the philosophical ideas of how the wonders of nature can be applied to everyday life. He

expresses his undying love for all figments of nature showing that his theoretical thoughts on life

give him the spirit of free will. His love of observation never draws his mind to travel to a

destination but to wander throughout the woods in “exhilaration.” Walden expresses his

worriless love of strolling through nature as he is “standing on bare ground, - my head bathed by

the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space.” His mood of overflowing freedom conveys the

image of Emerson being the type of intellectual individual that will stand in the vast forest
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without any particular objective at hand. Emerson’s ability to quickly observe nature and connect

it to life shows that he is a free thinker that will generate many thoughtful ideas at any time no

matter where he is. His concept of individualism shows he believes that everyone should have

the right to think freely, and free thinking needs no destination. Emerson’s overall idea is that a

journey can be started by an individual without that individual knowing where he needs to go

because he has the right to venture into this world with his own freedoms at hand.