I.76 — Your Own

The lamp goes out. No one has checked what is past that point, and this book will not pretend to.

You can grip this fact for a whole life, with a fist so constant it is mistaken for the floor. Dread is only a grip on a future that is not here, and the future in question is the least here of all. Every chapter so far has been practice for this one.

Look at the fact plainly, the way you would look at any weather. It is coming. Its shape is unknown. Between now and then is the whole of your actual life, which the clench spends standing guard at the exit.

Then open the hand. Not by believing something about what follows — that is only a different fist — but by seeing that the thing gripped cannot be held anyway, and that the gripping empties the days that can. The lease was always finite. The house was always good.

Test it in small deaths first. The end of a good day. A door closing on a place you will not return to. Let them go open-handed, and notice that the letting is possible. The large one will need the same hand. Practice it now.