Crazy time. I have a dear dear friend arranging for her hospice care in the city, and am up in the country drawing elephants with young kids. So much to grieve, so much to joy in. One of those statements that’s a cliché because it’s so true.
A [ridiculous] clock in the hall coos in the hour with varying bird song. My mother-in-law, now gone, a true naturalist, really loved that clock, especially as hearing true bird song became difficult for her.
I suppose the deepest approach to the inevitable losses in life, the prospect of the loss of life itself, is to let go of regret, to learn to find contentment in what is before you, to stop wasting time worrying about what’s beyond recall (not of memory but of re-doing). But that’s so hard, for me at least (a master of discontent). For me, the more effective protocol is to make a concerted effort to remember regret, to remember, in advance, how it will feel when loss is in front of you, to remember, in advance, that this is a feeling that you don’t want to feel, and to focus, to the extent possible, on what you can possibly do to avoid the having to feel that feeling.
To imagine, in other words, that you are at a place with extremely few choices, and to think, from that position, of the choices that you wish that you had made when you had them.
I understand that it sounds Escheresque. Perhaps this type of forward/backward thinking only works when you have dear friends who are very sick, when you want to plead with them not to go but know that you really can’t do that to them, that their life is beyond their wish and yours.
They have lived their lives well—you have no question of that–but what about you? You feel pushed along by life, by rapids, gravity, momentum, but is that push really irresistible? Really?
ManicDDaily 
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