“… a too rambling habit of mind.”
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch
As I grow into the good years of seniorhood, I want, almost more than anything else, to further develop and fine-tune my “rambling habit of mind”, a quality largely criticized by Eliot’s residents of Middlemarch. I want to think like Mr. Brooke thought, with a thoroughly unrestricted spirit and a risk-taking heart. I want my thoughts to be fliers and racers and swimmers, shooting off in different directions, doing the dangerous and unbridled things that thoughts are supposed to do. Thoughts should have no weights to weigh them down, no nooses around their necks, no fences to force them into small and petty places. Thoughts are as old as stars and as wild as winds among mountains, and I want to wish mine the best as they sightsee in the land of elderly, enlightened thinking. My mind has always liked a bit of rambling - some occasional unobstructed, purposeless strolling among the millions of thoughts that throng all of us in this universe – and I mean to make it a habit in these white-haired, light-hearted, happy-go-lucky years.
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