Serene Gratitude— At West End Gallery
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
I was going to write something else this morning but am feeling a bit foggy and tired. Instead, I thought I would share a post from a few years back and add the Don McLean song, Castles in the Air, at the bottom.
This is a well-known quote from Walden. Maybe the most well-known. It basically states, in my opinion, that we are meant to dream, to imagine better things and circumstances for ourselves. But there comes a time when we have to put the necessary work if these dreams are ever to become a reality.
Pretty sound stuff. The value of work and dreams is not lost on me. My life as it currently is, relatively simple and humble, was once a castle in the air. I was leafing through an old journal from when I was 16 or 17 years old and came across a list of goals for my future.
I had forgotten that I had made such a list and was surprised at how closely it matched the life I now live. Apparently, though I stumbled and fumbled around for too long a time, I somehow subconsciously made my way back to those castles I had built in the air with that list as a teenager.
I was pleased at first for it validated this idea that you somehow eventually reach destinations for which you set a course. Then I began to wonder what might have happened had I built my castles even further up in the sky.
Were the goals of an unexceptional and naive 16-year-old too restrained and self-limiting? Or did that 16-year-old know itself better than I currently think it did, that it already recognized its own core strengths and deficiencies?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But I can say that I don’t regret placing the foundation under the castle that I first built in the air when I was young. It suits me.
My one wish is to have time enough to put other foundations under a few other castles that float in the air above me. We shall see.
As it is with most of the quotes I use here, I like to seek out the context in which they appear in their original form. I felt that the paragraphs that end with these words from Thoreau should be shared in full.
There’s still a lot of meat on this old bone from Mr. Thoreau:
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Redtree Times 
Nothing wrong with Castles in the air … I was always called a daydreamer. Now … many years lived I know that some dreams or castles in the air I should have tried harder for or to put foundations under but I still truly appreciate recalling the paths to those places, those pond side areas … those castles. So I can’t say for certain that I travelled in the way of those dreams or if in fact my dreams changed but I remember it all. I also like Don McLean’s song of the same name but think about other songs ~ new and old which might be saying a bit of truths re these castles in the air or at least one or two lines from Lily Meola’s song Daydream, ” … don’t quit your daydream, Its your life you are making. Why save it for sleep when you could be living your daydream. ” While we may or may not have time for more foundations under castles in the air I hope we appreciate the journeys that took us there.
I think anyone who arrives at a point in their life when they are content and with few regrets must have built a foundation under some castle in the air of their own.