and so close, this knowledge of want

“The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves — and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it - that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and out limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are — so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.””

To love existence is to love what is indifferent to you

People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains and driving and planting tomatoes and harvesting tomatoes, kissing or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed, a spider living by the stove as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio being killed after their owner opened their cages and shot himself, people talking about childhood while holding babies, hands behind the heads that can’t support their own weight, eating lunch and other meals at tables, sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke, having a beer in a room before a funeral and a beer in the same room after the funeral, a spider living in the window as a woman cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it to her mother’s chemoed head in Memphis, people going on too long and people letting people go on too long, standing in a doorway meeting the lover of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea, liking her smile, people drinking too much and people letting people drink too much, making beds for them, helping them in, people sitting beside people under trees, trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.