Trust Thyself

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” first published in 1841, is one of the most inspiring texts I’ve ever encountered. It reads like a gospel for anybody who’s looking to dedicate him or herself to the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life. And because in Emerson’s day such a pursuit often demanded a brave parting of ways with convention, a casting off of societal mores (and still does in our own day, to a lesser degree), “Self Reliance” has a lot to say about courage, inspiration, and the lessons we ought to take from the triumphs and accomplishments of the famous lives that went before us.

I return to “Self Reliance” often, and it never fails to reverberate anew. Here are some of its highlights (and these are highlights only, a mere sampling from the great 30,000 word text).

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. … A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility… Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. …

See another recent Soul Shelter post presenting a similar idea — albeit much less gloriously: the value of keeping a notebook so our “spontaneous impressions” don’t flutter away.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. … A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Here Emerson states the Big Idea of Soul Shelter, which we phrase this way on our “About” page: “All too often a job is just a job, uninspiring or worse. Why is this so? Can things be otherwise? If not, then what changes might we make in order to devote ourselves to work that feels more meaningful?”

What’s Emerson’s solution?

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. … [But] society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. … I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. … What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. … It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. … But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. …

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. …

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. …

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. … But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. …

In Emerson’s view, inspiration is active, not passive. The inspired individual, rather than being the lucky recipient of frequent dispatches direct from some angelic muse, is more likely somebody who participates in the power of accomplishments preceding him or her. In other words, the truly inspired person does not wait in a room for an angel to visit, but goes out and collects and samples the fruits of others’ inspiration, closely examining just why this or that inspired work succeeds, and applying the lessons of its success to his or her own talents.

So the self-reliant individual learns to stand before an enduring creation—or ponder the achievements of another—without being cowed or worshipful, and to engage another’s success and synthesize it with his own unique potential.

To be self-reliant in this way, Emerson insists, is to “live in the present … above time,” in a place where ideas of consequence and beauty are abundant, and self-trust is as natural as the existence of a rose.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. …

If we live truly, we shall see truly. … The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. …

I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. … It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. …

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. … We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

The prophetic power of Emerson’s admonishment here always gets me. Who can read such a thing and not feel the irresistible impulse to stand up at last and take arms against his sea of troubles, to set out on the Heroic Journey toward happiness, creative fulfillment, and a balanced and befitting life?

Immediately Emerson goes on to address the problematic American pragmatism that tends to make us timid once an adventuresome undertaking fails to go as we’d hoped. From what I know of American measures of success, these observations hold all too true today.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ’studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. …

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. …

Now, I don’t mean to be too timid and “quote a sage” instead of self-reliantly trusting myself, but that last line is one I ought to plaster to the wall above my desk. Such a simple and powerful truth is too easily forgotten.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. … Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. … Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. …

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. …

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

So there’s “Self Reliance” in severe abridgement. Find the whole masterful text online, or better yet, buy a volume of Emerson for lifelong reference.

You might also enjoy:

“Time For Everything”

“Simplify, simplify!”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)“