all we’ve got

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Courtyard at the Picasso museum in Málaga

‘ “The  past,” he said, resting three fingers across the mouth of his cup to keep Bea from pouring yet another refill, “is a gravity. It holds you to the earth, but it also keeps pulling you down, trying, like the earth itself, to reclaim you. And the future, always looking that direction, planning, anticipating – that’s a kind of freefall, your feet have left the ground, you’re just floating there, floating where there is no there.” ‘ from Salt River by James Sallis

Sometimes, you simply can’t help yourself. You’re reading along, minding your own business, and the author’s voice somehow comes off the page, out into the air and whooooosh…it opens something up inside you that wasn’t there before. That’s roughly what happened when I read the above passage.

One side of the spectrum drags you down – back to the ground. Or even lower, actually. In the other direction is a kind of emptiness. You’re still there, but the ground isn’t. You might not be falling yet, but the sense of anticipation might as well be dropping the bottom out from beneath you.

No clue if this speaks to any of you. It might not be nearly as profound in your ears as it was in mine.

The extremes that’re laid out in this description: the groundedness of what’s past and the groundlessness of what’s to come – yet another argument, quite compelling even, to stick with right now. This very moment. On some level, it’s all we’ve got.

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