Some New Year's Thoughts from Great Minds

On New Year's Day 2017, I took a long walk through the neighborhood, and that might be the best way to begin any new beginning - by taking a walk. That bit of insight is not mine, but from America's original original, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a proponent of walking:

No one has made a more compelling case for the bodily and spiritual value of walking — that basic, infinitely rewarding, yet presently endangered human activity — than Henry David Thoreau. In his 1861 treatise Walking, penned seven years after Walden, Thoreau reminds us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization. He makes a special point of differentiating the art of sauntering from the mere act of walking:

This Thoreau-ian insight was collected for us by one of the premier "ideas bloggers" out there, Maria Popova, whose Brainpickings site is one of the best collections of literary and philosophical tidbits found anywhere on the web. Popova is a consumate reader and writer who posts regularly about information that is just too wonderful to keep to herself. For New Year's Day, she collected "fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement."