Our future goals—for our career, for our physical fitness, for anything—are our "aspirations." This word, which literally means "a breathing toward," has an murky connection with its dominant modern meaning of a "desire for our future." These tenuous links still can still help us appreciate the notion of aspiration as it appears in Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Method of Nature, his 1841 meditation on the paradoxical tension between individual ambition and grand historical narrative.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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