Quite often I set something down to do something else. I’ll put down one book to read another. I’ll forget to flip the record because I realized, one track in, in that I needed to do the dishes, which don’t get finished because I needed to load the washing machine. The wet clothes in the machine spoil, because by this point, I’m late for work.
At any given second, there is so much life demanding to be lived that living becomes an exercise in constantly giving up the lives you could have. I am not very talented at letting those lives go.
Which is a huge reason I love the poetry of Dean Young. Not that he is any better or worse than me at letting go of potential outcomes, but the man knows how to express that flitting back and forth between dread and joy.
And in his poem, “Resignation Letter,” Young deals with lost opportunity and death with the same even hand of a man who had to drop something else to do it, writing that “The student moves to the next blank, leaving the previous unfilled. So much life we cannot have, or find, or repeat. Yet so much we have had, and found.”
I have to get ready for work now, which means putting this post, which feels largely unfinished, to bed. I’m tempted to dwell upon what this post might have become, but that behavior is strongly anti-productive.
You get used to it anyway.
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