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You Read Clearing Paths To The Past 'And To Be Of Use,'

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Clearing Paths to the Past and “To Be of Use” both share the theme of doing things because they need to be done even if they have no relevance to your own life. In the first passage, a man clears his sidewalk of snow every winter for the kids going to school. Though he doesn’t use the snowless path very often, he knows that those kids do and wants to make their lives a bit easier. The second passage discusses the author’s love for people who do things for other people without any hesitation. She talks about how fantastic people who jump head-first into situations that aren’t beneficial to themselves are. From these two stories, the reader can learn many important things. Reading Clearing Paths to the Past gives the reader a chance to look at the other side of the spectrum and see our success from the people who brought it to our lives. The saying “ignorance is bliss” comes to mind as the students walking the path to school every day are completely naive to the man that scraped away all of the snow from the path, and they’re perfectly happy without that knowledge. If they knew …show more content…

While the people doing the helping know that they’re being nice, they don’t know that people like this writer are out there who see them and appreciate them for what they are. Once again, the helper is naive to the person watching them and has no idea that they really are appreciated. From these two passages we can learn that helping people is a good thing and has its benefits, even if the person that you’re helping doesn’t know you’re there. The man who shovelled his sidewalk for the students was unseen by them as they flocked to school, but he didn’t mind as he was content with watching their success from his window. The woman who wrote the second passage talked about her appreciation for people like the man in the first

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