History

Sometimes people seem like blobby, bumbly gray ghosts to me, bumping against each other like balloons. Or like particularly stupid flies who can't find their way out of the open window.

I want to say: think! Think about what you actually want. Not what you're supposed to want, and not what you crave at the moment as a release or a respite. No: what's your heart's desire? I think in most of us it distills to a few simple things. We're making it a lot more complicated than it has to be.

Still. The morning comes quick, with jagged sun splinters, and the day ratchets up and kicks into life, and the momentum of all my past compromises and makeshifts sweeps me into motion, and there I am, running with the tide of it, a little phototropic creature leaning to the sky, but moving always slantways with the current.

I am not big on fresh starts and new beginnings. Americans are too fond of them. "If only we could escape history first," they say, "then we could get on the right track." But we are our history, we are nothing but our history. Our past is all we have to work with. I know the impulse all too well, but I think we had better abandon it. No. instead, say "what is it that my heart wants?"

And do the same with the people you love. You don't have to give them what they ask for. You have to give them what they want. A far harder task, but a far more rewarding one.

Inquire, inquire, inquire. Ask again. Don't assume you know. You don't.