Lights Along the Road · Hiroshi Kanda
Chapter 20: Planting Good Thoughts
The Words: Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911
In the twenty-seventh chapter of The Secret Garden, published in 1911, Frances Hodgson Burnett steps back from her story to share an idea she held dear. In my own words, she writes that one of the new things people had begun to learn in the century before was that thoughts are as powerful as electric batteries: as good for us as sunlight, or as bad for us as poison. To let a sad or bad thought settle in the mind, she says, is as dangerous as letting a fever germ into the body. Then she sums it up in a line spoken as if to a boy: "Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow."
A thistle is a prickly wild plant that quickly fills empty ground. Burnett's point is simple and practical. A mind, like a garden, is never truly empty. If we do not plant and care for something good, something prickly will grow there by itself. But when good thoughts are planted and tended, the bad ones have much less room.
The Life Behind the Words
Burnett was born in 1849 in Europe. When she was still a small child her father died, and the family became poor. As a teenager she moved with her family across the ocean to North America, where she began to write stories for magazines to help earn money for the household. She soon became a popular writer, and over a long life she wrote many novels for adults and for children. Her best-known books for young readers include Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden.
She loved gardens all her life, and a walled rose garden she cared for at an old house is often said to have helped inspire The Secret Garden. The story tells of Mary, a lonely and sour girl, and her cousin Colin, a boy who believes he is too ill to live. As they bring a neglected garden back to life, they come back to life themselves. By chapter 27, Mary has grown kind and curious, and Colin has learned to walk and even to run. Burnett pauses here to explain why: their minds have been filled with new, good things.
What the Words Ask of Us
We cannot always stop unhappy thoughts from arriving. Worry, envy and gloom come to everyone. Burnett does not ask us to fight them all day. She suggests something easier and kinder: fill the ground with something better. Each time we give attention to a good thing, such as a plan, a friend, a beautiful sight or a useful task, we are planting a rose. The thistles do not vanish at once, but they find less and less room.
Think of Leo, seventy-three, who has lived alone since his wife died and often spends his evenings going over old regrets. His granddaughter gives him a packet of seeds and asks him to grow tomatoes for her. Soon his evenings are filled with watering, checking leaves and reading about soil. The regrets still visit sometimes, but now they share his mind with small green plants, and with the pleasure of a phone call each week to report on their progress. Leo did not argue with his sad thoughts. He simply planted something else.
Similar Words From Around the World
The Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha's sayings in Pali, begins with two verses that say the mind goes before all things. If we speak or act with a troubled mind, suffering follows; if we speak or act with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves. Burnett's garden and the Buddha's shadow make the same point from two directions. What we plant in the mind does not stay there. It grows into our words, our actions and our days.
A traditional saying in Swahili, a language of East Africa, says haba na haba hujaza kibaba: little by little fills the measure. A kibaba is a small container for measuring grain. This echo adds patience to Burnett's idea. One good thought will not change a mind full of thistles. But one today, one tomorrow and one the day after will slowly fill the space, just as Mary and Colin changed over many weeks of digging and planting. A mind, like a garden, is made little by little.
Living It Today
Burnett's words are useful to anyone whose mind sometimes fills with worry: a student before exams, a parent awake at night, a worker who brings problems home, an older person who feels lonely. The aim is not to pretend that everything is fine. It is to give the mind something good to grow, so that worry is not the only plant in the garden.
Today, choose one rose to plant in your own mind. It could be a book you are looking forward to, a letter you want to write, a skill you want to learn, or a real plant on your windowsill. Give it a few minutes of attention each day this week, especially when your mind turns gloomy. Watch how much room it slowly takes. A garden of good thoughts can begin with a single seed.
Chapter 21: The Road Is Made by Walking
The Words: Antonio Machado, early 1910s
Antonio Machado wrote a group of short poems called Proverbs and Songs, first published in the 1910s. Number 29 of them has become one of the best-known poems in Spanish. In my own words, it says: traveller, your footprints are the road, and nothing more. Traveller, there is no road; the road is made by walking. And when you turn and look back, you see the path that you will never walk again. Traveller, there is no road, only the wake on the sea, the white line a boat leaves behind it, which soon disappears.
The poem is short, but it holds a whole way of seeing life. There is no map waiting for us, already drawn. Each step we take makes the road. Looking back, we can see where we have been, but we cannot take the same step twice. Like a boat's wake on the water, the trail behind us fades. What remains is the walking, now.
The Life Behind the Words
Machado was born in 1875 in southern Europe and wrote in Spanish. He was a quiet and thoughtful man who earned his living for most of his life as a teacher of French in secondary schools, often in small towns far from the great centres of culture. The dry hills, fields, rivers and old villages around those towns entered his poems, and much of his poetry grew from what he saw and felt in that quiet countryside.
His life had sorrow. He married, and his young wife died only a few years later, which left him deeply grieved. Yet his poems are not bitter. They are full of landscape, of memory, of questions about time, and of a simple wisdom that he liked to put into short sayings. Proverbs and Songs gathers many of these: small poems, a few lines each, that read almost like the words of a wise old friend. He died in 1939, and today his lines about the road are known by heart by many readers of Spanish, young and old.
What the Words Ask of Us
Many of us wait for a clear road before we start. We want to know exactly where a choice will lead, and we hesitate because we cannot see the whole way. Machado's words free us from this waiting. There is no road ready for you; you make it by walking. Each small step creates the next part of the path. This can sound frightening, but it is also full of hope. It means that our lives are not fixed in advance. We are the ones who make them, one step at a time.
Think of Farida, forty-six, who wants to change her work after twenty years in an office. She does not know what the new path will be, and for a long time this stops her. Then she decides to take one step: a short evening course in something that has always interested her. That step leads to a new friend, the friend to a small project, the project to a part-time job. Looking back a year later, Farida can see a clear path. It was not there when she began. She made it by walking.
Similar Words From Around the World
A traditional saying in Turkish says damlaya damlaya göl olur: drop by drop, a lake forms. Machado's road is made of footsteps; this lake is made of drops. Both pictures say that something large is built from many small parts, none of which looks important alone. A single footprint does not seem like a road, and a single drop does not seem like a lake. But keep going, and the road and the lake appear.
A traditional saying in Italian says chi va piano va sano e va lontano: whoever goes slowly goes safely and goes far. This echo adds a gentle note about speed. Machado does not tell us to run. The road is made by walking, and walking is a human pace. We do not need to make the whole road in one day. If we walk steadily, without rushing and without giving up, the road will carry us farther than we might expect.
Living It Today
These words help at every stage of life. A young person who does not yet know what to study can take one step and see where it leads. Someone who has moved to a new home can build a new life, walk by walk, meeting by meeting. An older person can see that the road behind is real and valuable, even though it cannot be walked again, and that there is still road to make ahead.
This week, think of one thing you have been waiting to begin until you could see the whole way. Then take only the first step: write the first page, send the first message, make the first phone call, or go to the first meeting. Do not plan the second step yet. Simply notice that, by taking one step, you have already made a small piece of road. Traveller, there is no road yet, and that is good news: your own feet will make it.