If you're anything like me, you keep adding things to the list of things you added yesterday to your list of things to do, even though a half-dozen things from last Tuesday's list of things remain incomplete, pushing the limit of whatever capacity for attention, focus and patience remains after a year of lockdown.
I get tired. I want a break from all the mostly self-imposed obligations and deadlines, so I occasionally have to stop and remind myself that all those obligations, all those deadlines, are the stuff of which a life is made.
I remind myself that living with incompletion, like living with ambiguity, might be an important life skill I am still learning and that a very long rest awaits me somewhere down the road.
And just when I think I'm about to finally finish that one project that's been hanging out on the edge of my nerves for two weeks, the computer has a fit, or the phone dies, or my collaborator is unavailable, or...
In other words, it's always something. And maybe that's some-thing for which we should be grateful.
It's Always Something
It's always something, isn't it?
Always something not quite finished,
not quite right, needs a nudge
this way or that. But what does it mean,
"A body at rest?"
Nothing is ever truly complete
except in death, and that only a
process concealed from our view.
Reaching for the unattainable
may be our most human quality,
and what most endears us to the gods.
In the end, it's our longing for perfection
our secret desire to break ourselves
against the unbreakable,
that drives us finally into the
naked, graceful embrace
of our own sweet imperfect nature.
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Click below to hear me read "It's Always Something."
Happy National Poetry Month and I'll see you tomorrow!
hugs from Joshua Tree,
rags