To Please The Dead.
It changes, after awhile, it all does. What do they say? The only thing that stays the same is that nothing stays the same. Adapt; overcome.
My skin is covered with second-guessing and that sticky residue that comes from being unsure of one’s self. By evening I see a face that would have tried harder, it offers an apology to the mirror. "We keep getting off to a bad start," is the half-hearted explanation that I offer up. Pallid, blue, losing touch.
You look at your past like it’s a pile of cord wood, as though it can be inventoried and measured and gone over again and again. And thus this future that you work so doggedly at exists simply to likewise be measured, compared, chalked up to either progress or stasis. O these failings of language! I don’t believe in existing for what might happen tomorrow. Or for correcting what happened yesterday. Or for hardening myself because the world is callous and people assuming, and all these piles of cord wood will one day topple. Reach deeply.
The first step:
Don't be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you'll be no one -- like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step:
Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.
My skin is covered with second-guessing and that sticky residue that comes from being unsure of one’s self. By evening I see a face that would have tried harder, it offers an apology to the mirror. "We keep getting off to a bad start," is the half-hearted explanation that I offer up. Pallid, blue, losing touch.
You look at your past like it’s a pile of cord wood, as though it can be inventoried and measured and gone over again and again. And thus this future that you work so doggedly at exists simply to likewise be measured, compared, chalked up to either progress or stasis. O these failings of language! I don’t believe in existing for what might happen tomorrow. Or for correcting what happened yesterday. Or for hardening myself because the world is callous and people assuming, and all these piles of cord wood will one day topple. Reach deeply.
The first step:
Don't be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you'll be no one -- like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step:
Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.
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