Pursuing our genius, whether in art or conversation or sparring at a jiujitsu gym, will awaken us to “a higher life than we fell asleep from,” Thoreau wrote... The mornings Thoreau spent standing in his cabin doorway, “rapt in a revery,” he wrote, “were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.” Compared with that, he thought, labor was time wasted.
