I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea of embracing life's journey without needing to have a clear destination.
Wendell Berry expresses a sentiment about the importance of the journey in life rather than the destination. He suggests that it's okay to not have a fixed plan or clear understanding of where one is headed, as the very act of wanting to move forward and explore is a valid pursuit in itself. This openness to experience reinforces the idea that lifeβs uncertainties can be just as valuable as achieving specific goals.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say, 'As Wendell Berry once stated, 'I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going,' highlighting the importance of embracing life's unpredictability.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
If I have any worth, it is to live my life for God.
Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?
Day to day and doing the work and getting to that honest point - that, for me, is always about - and always will be as long as I do this - refining and refining and refining and refining the truth... constantly being as truthful and honest and raw and real as you can be.
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
I hope corporations will dedicate a percentage of their top innovators' time to issues that could help people left out of the global economy. This kind of contribution is even more powerful than giving cash or offering employees' time off to volunteer. It is a focused use of what your company does best. It is a great form of creative capitalism, because it takes the brainpower and makes life better for the richest, and dedicates some of it to improving the lives of everyone else.
If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.
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