"...will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before" A. Einstein.
I don't believe that this quote is necessarily about living along, or even being alone. No, as much as small snippets of well known quotes can be up to individual interpretation I have always found this quote to simply mean that one should always follow their own path, and that may not mean alone, but with others that are part of the journey, sometimes to the end, sometimes just a partner along the way.
Throughout my travels I have met people that have been a part of my travels, people who have encouraged me to keep moving forward, to take the chances that others may deem too risky, too selfish. To those people, I can wave off and leave behind with no consequence or care. Those who have been a part of the ongoing journey I keep with me, no matter how far apart we may be now. If I had never been prived to such adventurous and brilliant souls I would have never been so brave as to take the job in Las Vegas, where I would have never met a young man who would in turn teach me how little I really knew about myself. I would have never adventured back to Arizona, would have never had my heart broken to such an extent that the sun itself seemed to never rise. This would in turn take me Brooklyn, where friends opened their hearts and doors and I came to realize just how much I truly love the expansive skies and ponderosa pines, and...in the end I would have never taken a deep breath and come back to South Dakota, to a town most of my friends have never heard of. It may seem that I did these things on my own, but in fact, I was guided and encouraged and supported all along the way by people who understood that sometimes walking a different path is the normal path in itself.
I share this only because I have begun to also see how many people are held back by their own fears of what should be done, rather than what could be done. I can imagine that everyone, at some point, fears being alone. Fears that the decisions that they make will push others away, that these decisions will be "poor decisions", fearing change and the unknown. Believe me, I understand that. I am quite a creature of habit, I order pizza almost every Sunday, I frequent the same bars, I buy the same kind of chip at the store. But I also know that with the partnerships of people who will stand by me and support me, walk with me apart from the crowd, I am never alone.
Humans are, in truth, social creatures. We require some sort of companionship to feel that we belong. We all want to love, to be loved, in whatever sense that means to the individual. That is how we became what we are (here comes the anthropologist). We sat around fires late into the night when we were just an infant species and this created a time of the day in which we no longer needed to hunt or fight or do the daily tasks required for survival. While the rest of the planet was shadowed in night, we had light and we began to talk. We told stories, we shared our days, and we started to dream. This is what began to ignite our imaginations, to spark parts of our brains that would have otherwise been dormant. We began to dream. It was in these dreams, these wonderings, that I believe we began to think and then...we began to do.
I know that seems a species centric, but hey, I am a little partial to the homo sapiens and I have this fantastic idea that eventually, those who really stick to their metaphorical guns and do all that they long and hope and dream of doing will find partners along the way to walk that path with. Friends, family, loves. Some just guiding hands along the way, and if we are luck someone who will share the journey with us. In a sense, a moving crowd. So, although Einstein may have been referring to the need to break away from the crowd, perhaps he should have inferred that the crowd itself can change, we just have to bring them with us.
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