These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it.

The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love.

I was standing in a driveway making the idlest conversation, just as plenty of the people who had asked me when I would get married and when I would have children were making idle conversation.

It was nothing but noise, a question for the sake of speaking and not for the sake of inquiry.

That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.

so I pass this along as advice: if you meet someone you like and you have the means to do so, ask that person to go with you to Vienna.

For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by. A meteor could be skating past Earth’s atmosphere this very minute. We’ll never know how close we came to annihilation, but today I saw it—everything I had and stood to lose and did not lose.

I’d been afraid I’d somehow been given a life I hadn’t deserved, but that’s ridiculous. We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

I wished for the imperious rabbit what I would wish for anyone: a little love, a little bit of safety and consistency. It turned out to be an enormous ask.