All year I have waited for things to happen, and now that they are happening, I have a soft hesitation in my heart. I sit by myself, paralysed, with the suitcase still unpacked, the piles of clothes surrounding it like an audience around a stage. I know I will get off this chair and do it eventually. But if it were truly up to me, I would stay in the same place forever despite my deep wish for continual change. I am glad that is not the case, though, that it is not entirely up to me, no.
We like to pretend we are in charge of what happens to us. But I would not blame the match for lighting a forest on fire. Many words for it, I believe: fate, god, the universe, or (dumb) luck. But then, people are no matches. They are free agents, free to choose from the limited choices placed before them, but choices nonetheless. Now, what the choices are, and what limits them is a series of questions, a train of thought which leads nowhere. But I know I am still free to choose where my life goes. It is not up to us if we can do everything in this life, but we can all do something.
In many ways, this life has been a blessing. Thoughts I had when I was a child, and dreams I had more than a decade ago, are now coming to fruition; many have already become part and parcel of the life I live. What else can you ask for? In about five days, I will be in a city I have wished to see for more years than I can remember.
Bah, all this hullabaloo to inspire myself to get up and pack a suitcase. The hyperbole of the writerly life is not washed over me. We make things larger than they are and pretend to know a thing or two while we go about our lives like a bunch of Bumbling Smees, barely managing to be a people. So many in history we consider great could have just been regular Joes simply blowing things out of proportion, waiting for a paycheck or procrastinating. Genius could very well be a mere slide on the microscope of time.
Perhaps, it is about disconnecting. Surely, they had to be cut from a different cloth; we tell ourselves to save ourselves from the burden of knowing that we, too, could achieve unimaginable things.