I.78 — The Long View

Step back once and look at a life whole, the way you would look at a river from a hill.

From up close every bend was a crisis. From here it is water finding the sea by the only route there was. The grips that felt permanent were eddies. The friction was the sound of moving. The self that gripped so hard was a shape the water took for a while, in one place, before taking another.

This is not a consolation and should not be swallowed as one. It is a change of distance, available to anyone who climbs the hill, and the climbing is only attention set at a longer range. Try it. Look at your life across ten years as if it were someone else's. Notice which griefs turned out to be bends, and which grips were holding the river back from where it was going anyway.

Then come down. The hill is not where a life is lived. But a person who has stood on it a few times carries something back — not a thing to keep, since nothing here is kept, only a sense of the water as water, and of the hands as hands that never held it still.