While you're in it, life seems epic. Fiery, tenuous, and
unpredictable. But once you have some distance from it, everything seems to
shrink, until it's almost out of focus.
When you look back over your life, or try to put it down on
paper, You can see more of it now than ever before. And yet it seems somehow
diminished. Humble. Almost old-fashioned. So you begin scanning your life,
looking for something interesting or beautiful. You see an ordinary house, with
an ordinary yard, on an ordinary street. It looks smaller than you remember.
You once had wild dreams and obstacles and risks looming all around you, but
now they look smaller too.
You remember giants and goddesses and villains, but all you
see is ordinary people assembled in their tiny classrooms and work-spaces, each
of us moving around in little steps, like tokens on a game board. No matter how
many times you rolled the dice, it was always these little moves, here and
there. Do a little work. Take a little rest. Make a little friend. Throw a little
party. Feel a little boredom. Have a little rebellion. There are so many of
these token moments that were supposed to represent some other thing. You keep
adding them all up, as if there was something you forgot to count, some stash
of glory that fell off the back of a truck.
You may love the life you have for everything it is, and
even though you know it isn't groundbreaking; you wouldn't change a thing.
Maybe when you first started building the life you wanted, you left plenty of
room for what might happen, and somehow lost track of what was happening.
Or maybe you were never 'in it' to begin with. Maybe you
knew even then that this wasn't the world you expected. A world so low and
common you tried to keep your distance, floating somewhere above it, where
nobody else could look down on this life you built.
Nobody else but you.
TJ
