Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.

This is a poem that truly defines my perspective on life. I understand that this is not likely to be a popular perspective, but it is mine regardless. This poem describes for me a time when I truly and completely understood that nothing on this earth was better than what I would have in heaven with my Father. Upon reading this poem, all I could think of was King Solomon's words basically saying everything on this earth is meaningless, like chasing the winds. Nothing we do in this world, like how much money we make, or what car we drive is going to matter because the dead will be forgotten and all that will matter is the living. This is part of the reason I really don't care much about my family tree because no matter what I do, I will never know my ancestors in this world personally. My ancestory is as meaningless to me as the King of France in the 1300s. I don't know them and I never will. I may know of them, but in the end, everything one person does is only remember by those whose lives that person touched. The point, therefore, of my tale is that if you want to be remembered, then you must touch the lives of others so that they will carry on the memory of who you were. Otherwise this poem will completely apply and all of your life will have been wasted for nothing.

Good-bye

Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world! I’m going home.

Good-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth’s averted eye;
So supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home.

I am going to my own hearthstone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone,—
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird’s roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit
When man in the bush with God may meet?

~Ralph Waldo Emerson