(curbfeeler)
Name your most recent failure. I’ll go first: Overarching and ever-present failures notwithstanding, my most recent failure has been an inability to obtain gainful employment in a position I believe suits me wholly. The underlying reason for my failure is hesitation based on over-examination of my work history to delay response too long to correspond in a timely fashion. I’ve been thumbing an appropriated reward system into ill-fitting cubicles for most of my adult life. In my youth, I found myself in lots of strange places that I hadn’t naturally sought. Choir, piano lessons, the forest, floating in pools of motor oil, lots of sports. The results of my parents’ urging. I appreciate this now. But the quiet child I was then (and will always overcompensate for) was not easy in approaching these things. On reflection - in the years since I’ve moved away from the family home - I’ve slowly insulated myself from failure. I’ve struck out here and there and done handfuls of bold things, but I realize now that these were, in one way or another, partially underwritten by someone else. Or that the stakes were so low that I never allowed the edgy bits to get too close to the gooey membrane of my ego. That is not living. That is the healthy in hospice for the promise of a warm bed. That is confusion of the inevitable with the intentional. And, in the Dickinsonian sense, the futility and the ecstasy of remembering oneself in The Swirling Tumult is something I have (heavily and) unsuccessfully insulated myself against. Opportunities sometimes seem to present themselves in unison. This is likely fallacious. We place ourselves in holding patterns to which we acclimate. Death and taxes… Yeah. But life requires that we engage with it directly. We intermittently wake up. And multitudes of options, awaiting our attention, eagerly present themselves. Or. They don’t. Either way. (Unless you absolutely have to.)
Don’t sleep.