A Quote From Henry David Thoreau

After all of these years of intending to read it, but failing to do so, I'm now reading "Walden" by Thoreau. In the chapter "Sounds", he tells how he lived at Walden Pond and parts of it sounded very much to me, and to Glynda, the way some of our retirement days go by. Thoreau says:

"For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine ; it was morning, and lo, - now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill,
sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; . . ."

Many of our days (and his) don't happen this way at all, but sometimes in the evenings we look at each other and think that this day has gone by very much like Thoreau described in this passage. I don't mean to compare our lives to his because his solitude and remoteness was much more extreme than ours would ever be but I have searched for words like these a few times when someone has asked how retirement is going.