The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.”

He said the legend was that the swans had once lived by eating light, but the gods had found their beauty threatening and made them hunger for grass instead. But the swans had eaten enough light that it could still sometimes be seen within them.

“Weltschmerz,” I said, feeling the heaviness of the word as it passed my lips. “German for world weariness and pain. It’s the idea that physical reality can never meet the demands of the mind.

I wanted to hear why he had to blow up my world in order to make his better. Men did this sometimes.

You said life happens here and now, and it’s a fool’s bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.

Great love inevitably carries with it great loss.

I learned that love is not static; love does not divide. What love we find in this world is coming toward us and traveling away from us simultaneously. To say we find love is a misuse of the word find. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love. Love is essential and as common as bread. If you look for it, you will see it everywhere, and you will never be without it.

He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation. That was Jack’s great lesson.