“A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us. It takes but little distance to make the hills and even the meadows look blue to-day. That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant.”― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

Any hiker is familiar with Thoreau’s description, so too any sailor. Those who venture out into the world are bound to find it. It takes but little distance to make where we’ve been take on a bluish hue. The same can be said for where we’re going, if we look far enough ahead anyway. Life is only abundantly clear when we live in the present. ’tis this day that we must seize.

Just as Thoreau documented his life through his journal entries and the books he wrote, so we may document our own journey from, toward. These breadcrumbs show where we are as much as where we’ve been. The act of writing every day, then publishing a bit of it, has changed each of us that travel this path. The lingering question isn’t when we’ll stop writing, but why it took us so long to begin? So much of our pre-writing lives will remain entombed within us when we pass one day—isn’t that a pity? The world doesn’t need to know all the details, but there are some tasty breadcrumbs growing stale back there on the trail.

It’s essential to ask ourselves where we’ve come from to bring us here. So too to look at where we’re going. The act of writing about such things is contemplative and enlightening, states the world ought to linger in more than it currently does. I often get caught up in the excitement of tomorrow, and were it not for the daily ritual of writing I might miss now altogether. Life isn’t meant to be shaded in blue, but lived forthwith—with all the immediacy and urgency that word conveys. What would we write about tomorrow that reflects where we’ve been today? Steer towards that.