Actualization of self cannot be sought as a goal in its own right. . . Rather, it seems to be a by-product of active commitment of one’s talents to some cause, outside the self, such as the quest for beauty, truth, or justice.
In wildness is the preservation of the world… Life consists of wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a ‘sanctum sanctorum’. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. In short, all good things are wild and free.
Henry David Thoreau