How To Dance to the Music Only You Hear

And How To Prepare Yourself for What Follows

Practicing philosophy and living by our values can leave us looking strange and out of touch. 

The Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau thought we should embrace this. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” he wrote in Walden,  “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

But your out-of-step marching may well attract attention, which we have to steel ourselves for.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things,” Epictetus told his students. “Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other (Enchiridion 13).