Peace and the Surprise of Back and Forth

There's a lot in the writings of Henry David Thoreau with which I disagree.  Still, in On Walden Pond and other works, he makes a good many observations about living in solitude in close contact with nature that are beautiful, true and sometimes even helpful.

He writes early in OWP that he was surprised that while he moved into a natural setting, in part to not be subject to the work-a-day grind of city life, he still carried many routines with him into the woods.

In particular, he observes that after two weeks living, he'd already worn a trail to the pond.  He deems the fact of that path to be a problem, given what he'd moved to the woods to do.

If he and I'd talked about this before he'd left (I can't think why he didn't call), I'd have bet him lunch money that he'd have carried with him a great number of his old routines and once there, created other new ones to accommodate his new life.  After all, it was his adventure, not someone else's...of course he'd take himself.

For Thoreau, the surprise was in his reflexive creation of new routine.  I think that was a confusion.  I'd submit that routine isn't intrinsically either good or bad.  It's how we live and listen in our routines that gives them their great good value or that can even cause them to be an agony.

For those of us who don't pay overmuch attention to our routines, the biggest surprise they produce is usually disruption of same.  Sudden medical or financial issues, new opportunities and many many issues associated with child rearing to name just a few, all serve to shoulder us out of our daily paths.

Clearly, this can be for good, for bad or both.

I am however, slowly learning though that these are all good in at least one sense.  Namely, they categorically serve to invite us into something new.  And that something new always includes a choice.

The choice is this:  What will be our response to the new disruption?  Who will we share it's import with?  And for those of us that follow Christ, who, what and where is he in our new, disrupted reality?

We often confuse uneventful routine with peace.  Peace is not the absence of adversity or challenge.  Peace is always in relationship and always a response, until it is finally grafted into us as an indivisible piece of who we are.