Anything Considered

"It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured."

[TACTICUS, in Agricola]

The bad and good of man are so oft' intwined in everyday circumstances that I wonder if petty squabbles are a thing from fate. That something so harmless - so typically a bureaucratic-waste-of-time - can degenerate into bad blood and unity in affront is frightening to behold. Worse, I am in ways the cause and passive perpetrator of this comic scene and this leaves me with a pain in the ethical backside.

Indeed, age and sophistication teach us how to be foolish men.

Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?
And you
& I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?
And you, a
child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,
And what
we had
give way like coffee grains
brushed across paper . . .

[TO MY SOUL by Jean Valentine; The New Yorker, May 29 2007]

By a twist of fate I should have expected, my old blog is gone. And I have nothing left to show of it - no archives on my hard disk, no previous templates, no screenshots. Now I mourn in strange melancholy the loss of a great deal of my history.

My old blogs have always provided me avenues for introspection and reminiscence. In these indelible moods nothing beats plaintive reviews of the part of me left behind - of "I wish", of "How could I", of "Oh my, was I once like that?!", and "Thank God that turned out well." Indeed, so much has. Hopeanew chronicled the highest and lowest moments of my life in script, and with its passing, I wonder how soon these memories will fade into the abyss of worthlessness.

Yet, perhaps this best marks a time for change. I haven't let go of a good many things, and this clinging to past hopes is crippling a brighter future. If now is the time, then to my soul I say, fly free.