Yours, or handed to you

Yesterday a man told you to form a habit. Today two men tell you the habit has to be yours.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. Emerson had left the pulpit and wrote an essay, Self-Reliance, that said the thing nobody in a church was saying out loud: "Trust thyself." The thought you dismiss because it is yours is usually the one worth keeping, and the reason you don't keep it is that you are watching everyone else to see if it is allowed. Thoreau took him at his word, borrowed an axe, built a cabin by Walden Pond, and lived there two years to find out what a life needs and what it doesn't. He kept the receipts. The cabin cost twenty-eight dollars and change.

Nobody is asking you to move to the woods. He left the pond himself, because he had other lives to live. The question he kept asking is the only question this first month cares about: what in this life is mine, and what did I inherit without checking?

Most of what you believe arrived before you could vote on it. Your family's idea of money. Your town's idea of success. The line about who you are that someone said once when you were nine. Some of it is gold. Some of it is a coat that never fit, and you have been wearing it for thirty years because it was handed to you.

This key does not ask you to throw anything out. It asks you to look at the label.