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It feels like an important moment, like one of those critical junctures in life when you’re supposed to say something or do something, but you don’t know what. Only later does it hit you. Later, the thing you should have said will be as clear as day, but right now it’s just a nagging feeling, a clenched jaw and low nausea.
There is no separating yourself from the things you make, he thought. If you are a cesspool, what else can your work be except shit?
Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.
Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.
If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.
But journalism was something else, wasn’t it? It was meant to be objective reporting of facts, no matter how contradictory. You didn’t make the news fit the story. You simply reported the facts as they were. When had that stopped being true?
The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not.
It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful.
Life can paralyze us, freeze us into statues if we think about things too long.
Maree Butler liked this
Life is made of these moments—of one’s physical being moving through time and space—and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.
Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?
“And I was looking out the window and thinking the whole time how unreal it felt—the way you sometimes feel like a stranger when you find yourself outside the limits of your experience, doing something that feels like the actions of another person, as if you’ve teleported somehow into someone else’s life.”
Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it’s over.
Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?
