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And the way you survive the days you think you cannot survive is to find as much of this feeling as possible in as many places as you can find it.
had that required them to listen repeatedly to a poem in a language they didn’t understand and then translate it into English. Their mission wasn’t to know what the words meant, but rather to hear them, to feel them, to imagine them, and then to conjure something from within themselves to translate the impossible mystery of those words into a poem of their own creation in a language they know.
and I’ve never tried my hand at this exercise, but it has stuck with me over the years, probably because, as audacious and nonsensical as it first seems, the task is ultimately what poetry—and life—asks us to do: attempt to make clarity and meaning out of the incomprehensible.
Perhaps because in some ways what we’re all being asked to do right now is to create something beautiful from the unknown languages we’ve suddenly found ourselves forced to comprehend. We’ve had to translate the sentence I don’t know how I’m going to do this into the opposite of its meaning and do and do and do this—as you have, Spent—time and time again.
My sense of mission was as decisive as it was inexplicable. I didn’t know exactly why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew it scared me and I had to do it. I trusted myself wildly. I hacked away at the hair that had been with me through the first half of my twenties because I felt instinctually it was the only way I’d be free. From
The first item on your to-do list isn’t to know. It’s to trust yourself wildly. Don’t turn away from the feelings that compelled you to write to me, even if they scare or confuse you. There is such a thing as a quarter-life crisis, and you’re in the midst of one. That’s excellent news. It means you’re already doing what you’ve asked me to tell you how to do. Go forward on your instincts.
Float down the channel of your curiosity, of your creativity, of your fears, of your ambitions, of your power, of your desires, of your dreams. Take out a notebook, and at the top of a blank page, write the word curiosity. On the next page, write creativity. On the next, fears and so on, page by page, through ambitions, power, desires, dreams, and other words you might wish to add, and then go back and fill each of those pages with lists of your own.
The regret you describe in your letter is all about inertia—about what you haven’t done, rather than what you have. Holding on to your regret will only keep you where you are, floating among the meaningless things that will eventually drown you.
Sometimes, at the beginning, forgiveness can’t be anything more than setting aside your shame for a while. It’s deciding you won’t allow it to continue to be a barrier between who you are now and who you want to be. It’s understanding that what you call regret might truly be something else—fear or sorrow or a twisted form of comfort (if you feel overwhelmed by regret, well then, you have an excuse not to do anything). It’s believing me when I say, You have not wasted a day.
