"Why do you have to go to Walden? Don't you have lots of woods in New Brunswick?"

Yes, we have woods in New Brunswick.  I've been spending time in solitude in the woods of New Brunswick since I was five years old! :)

There isn't just one reason I need to visit Walden Pond.

- In rereading Walden after the brain injury, there is a real resonance within me as I read.  The ideas of simplicity, and focusing on what truly matters, and what it really means to be alive have taken on a whole new meaning.  I need to stand where Thoreau stood.  It is a compulsion -- there is no other word for it.

- My self-faith shattered when I was hit by the car.  Travelling to a place I have never been before, under my own power (driving my car), in a different country, away from all friends and family will go a long way towards repairing that sense of trust in myself.  My head knows I will be just fine.  My gut needs me to prove it.

- In planning the nonfiction book Crossing the Street (about my journey since the accident), I didn't know how to end it.  But I had a sense that I would know the final chapter when I saw it.  This moment this pilgrimage came to me, I knew.  This trip to Walden -- and beginning the writing of the book in the room where Thoreau himself was born -- is that final chapter.  It is the culmination of the journey, the changes in mindset and attitude, the standing on my own again.

I must go to Walden.