The Future

ACCEPTING MISTAKES

That I will not always know what is driving me, no matter how much analysis I have.

That friends and lovers will change because I have changed. That, in the transition, there will be confusion.

It will be a mistake to forget death but not to forget my anxiety.

I make the mistake of total distraction in this the city of distractions.

The mistake would be to take my silly daily perturbations and make them more important than enjoying my life.

My mistake would be thinking time is infinite.

My face tells me that time is not infinite. One must do what one intrinsically believes is important now. There is no time to do otherwise.

The mistake is to think one is powerless.

ON STARTING OVER

One has to, in a way, look brightly to the future. One has to, most difficult of all, believe in a happy ending. This time.

Or one can just let life happen. That is a way, too.

One has to know one cannot see the road before us anyway. We have no idea what we look like, what impact our work has, what our love is made of. One can only take care of one’s body, work hard at one’s vocations and avocations, and love the people we are busy loving.

If we do not know whom we love, we must be loving all the time to everyone.

Why optimists love the mornings: Today I will do something well. Something that is good. I will make something. I will come through for the person I love.

Sometimes optimism fails. One believes that no new history can be written. One refuses to start over.

“Starting over” is another expression for investing in the present. I will love again.

Intelligently, one should weed out what is not good about one’s life and replace it with what feeds you. To do this, one has to take time away from one’s routines to discover what feeds you.

I drive a lot for my work. It is during those times I look at the weeds in my life and think about what can be done to improve my lot.

Starting over requires action. Fear defies action. Things are never as impossible as one thinks. One should only forge on.

It is difficult for me to start over because I am so aware of the continuity of my defects. And yet these same defects continually force me to have to start over.

If it makes you uncomfortable, it might be calling you.

In other words, you have to be willing for life to be better than you imagine. Your openness encourages the imagination of others to augment yours.

Sometimes letting people help you is a form of starting over. To keep your mouth shut and let people tell you what they see, how they would do it. Then you may get a sense of a new world.

My ex once yelled at me that I had forced him to date. I had not done what he wanted, and now he had to start over. Now he is happier than when he was with me.

If you need to start over, it is because your world has atrophied.

After a divorce is an ideal time. You are young again. Your skin may not be a young woman’s, your body not as alluring, but your nature is as vulnerable, your hopes as tenuous.

Fate becomes your lover.

Each moment I intend to start over, my mind slogs through all its rubbish, and each moment I have to free myself of it.

It is difficult to start over with friends from the past. They want to hold you to how they knew you. They are not so willing to watch you jump to the next island. They would have to explore the nature of starting over themselves. They are both envious of your opportunity, your energy, and aware that you may be going nowhere.

All of us have trouble with the futility of our attempts. No one is happy, except briefly. Part of starting over is to accept that.

DOING SOMETHING NEW

First, you grieve that one thing is ended. You really grieve. Then you turn around and you say, What if?

If you gravitate toward it, you move.

You try not to worry.

You believe.

DEATH BED

What will be important? My lover who will have spent years with me. Whoever he is.

Books. How they made me happy. And when someone understood my story, it was as if the story had its own life.

Sitting on the beach at Coney Island with a close friend who had been there sixty-five years ago as a child.

The times I laughed will not seem that important. Or cried. Just the times I gave myself.

Knocking at the door of God. I will think I should have knocked harder. It would have been another complex relationship.

The faces from work will be fleeting, but the ones who were vulnerable will stay with me. Always it will be the spirit that was important. Those who showed themselves to me.

I will cling to beauty. The images will be of the sea. Music will have healed pain.

All the dresses will have been unimportant.

Even the striving will be unimportant. What will resonate will only be where I surrendered to love, to the moment.

It will have been important to be kind to everyone.

Those who were consistent. And the times that I surprised myself by being so myself.

Sexual feelings, all of them, not necessarily in bed, but sexual feeling for people I was talking to, I will remember all that brightly.

The pristineness of the sun on the sea.

Hot summer nights, walking.

Phone messages that excited me. I won’t remember the words or the issues, but I will remember the pleasure of connection.

Anyone who graced the passage of time with humor.

So many people, it will seem, needed love. It will seem like it had been impossible to give all that was needed.

The consistency of friendship. The long ones that endured everything. What we went through will be irrelevant and not even memorable, just that we did it together.

My lover taking the time to wake me up in the morning.

The closeness of talking and running an arm around a friend’s neck, in friendship, in the sun.

Making calls and efforts for friends. Any effort. Any chance at love.

And what was all that busyness of making money? Perhaps only more of an opportunity to be in love relationships.

For some, the output of their work helps humanity. It was never such for me. I supported those who were feeding the cog. And that in itself was a privilege.

Friends’ faces as they loved and were loved. It was such a mistake to put anxieties first.

The sensual joy of concentrating.