Waiting

Some say that anticipation is the better part of happiness. I beg to differ. To be sure, opening Christmas presents is rarely as fun as wondering what might be hidden beneath, but that is only because of the disconnect between expectation and reality. If what you want does not measure what you get, of course there will be frustration. And if you expect anything to make you perfectly happy, you will never fail to be sorely disappointed. The trick, then, is to know exactly what you are getting, and the sort of happiness that it is going to give you, before you get it. It is a question of proportion. For instance, a trip to Disneyland is, in the end, going to provide little more than fatigue, expense, and sunburns, but try telling that to a young child. Or, again, a '66 Mustang is hardly going to make adulthood meaningful, but ten thousand mid-life crises would beg to differ. Our lives consist of almost-constant searching for the next missing thing, but we look for the wrong things, and in the wrong places. There are only a handful of things we need. Food? Shelter? Relaxation? No, we're not talking about comfort, here. We're talking about happiness. It's entirely different. What do we need for happiness? Faith. Hope. Love. And that last one is the key. Everything else in life is aimed at that one thing. Then, unlike all other cases, in which expectation always exceeds reality, the reality will simply blow all expectation out of the water. As I said before, it is a question of proportion, and the proportion, here, is the infinite to the finite. How could it not be infinitely better than we could possibly imagine?


Waiting

You pass the earth in endless shade,
a burgher of the night,
unvarying by retrograde
or growth, by gloom or light,
and longing, always longing for
some undelivered rite

to draw your drifting feet ashore
and set them on the sand.
The hours that you laid in store
are staler than planned,
and, still, their passage obligates
such rigorous demand

for stoicism. Why the fates
should ask so much of one,
to bind your frail frame with weights
before you had begun,
I cannot know, but offer trade
of two in place of none.