I have little to say about where my life is going, but I know that when I was done unpacking and cleaning some of the apartment last night and when I was done doing the dishes, which were not as many since I had only come back earlier in the evening, I went to close the curtain on the window. Before I dragged the grey curtain, I noticed this white cloud—a streak across the hills. Almost opaque, it seemed to have wrapped around the mountains like we do a scarf around our neck. We do it until we are sure it is spring. I cannot tell you where my life is going, but I am still curious; I still look around and doubt myself. If all those are true, it will be okay eventually. Wherever I end up, I will have made the correct decisions to get there, so I will have little to complain about. A simple cloud can make me feel incredible joy. What else is there? What else, indeed.
When they ask me: what did you do with your life? I will tell them I worked hard. Yes, I worked hard like my father, my mother, and their parents before them, but I stopped to look at the birds when I could. I will have that to my credit. It will have happened. I will have stopped a thousand—no, a million—times before to look at it all, to look at the big, bright world outside. I do not need a hut in the hills or a shack on the beach. I have no need to reject all we know.
Talking to a friend about art at a late hour when there was little else to do but talk about what we spent all of ourselves doing, I was asked to describe all my work in a single sentence. Of course, I could not do it. “But what will someone get out of your words?” He asked. “They will have read,” I said.
We talked more after that, but today I remembered that moment again. I know the answer to his question, too, and it is precisely how I have lived my life so far. I have done things for the sole purpose of doing them. The parts of my life reflect its whole and where it is going. Like how I write or how I love, it will have been lived for the act of living.
I will have lived and died; along the way, I will have stopped to look at the sky. What else is there? What else, indeed.