"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm"

Emerson would have a thing or two to say to the young people who fret and worry about what others think of them, lack enthusiasm, doubt their own originality and prospects. 

He said of the "meek young men" of his own day that they "grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” American Scholar

In Nature he said "The sun shines today also," so "Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" 

I've circled around again to Circles, the tenth of his first series of essays (1841), for reaffirmation of my own original relation to the universe. He'd of course prod me to "tell me what you know" rather than recycle his words, and I will. I do. I also share the circumspection he and I both admire in Montaigne: “Que sais-je?” We're all experimenting with words and visions here.

But so many of the words in Circles bear repeating. Here are some that struck me yesterday on re-reading.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul… if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned…

There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us…

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.

We can never see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it.[RWE was 38.]

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young… This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises…

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

Abandonent. Let go the past, just for now. Write your words, imagine your vision. Let it rip. 

Then circle back for another pass, as the gyre expands to contain your expanding imagination. 

And repeat the cycle.