“A human life is too vast, too rich and varied in content, for any given day’s events to be critical to the whole thing. Therefore, our willingness to be calm in the face of day-to-day unsettledness is much more important than the specifics of what is so unsettling about right now.”
“This is true even of the big, permanent events: deaths, losses, diagnoses and breakups. A death, for example, is clearly permanent, but it is your relationship to that event that gives it meaning, and that relationship is not at all permanent. It will change fairly rapidly, in fact. It will be quite different a week later, and very different a year later. And by then, it will be someone slightly (or greatly) different who is experiencing it. You don’t have to bear the weight of the entire catastrophe today. Other days, and other Yous, will split the burden, in ways you perhaps can’t see from here.”
At no time in my life did I think I might want to be a parent. If I thought about it at all, it was brief moments of mildly guilty introspection that quickly passed, certainly not a topic of conversation. Barb might have gotten some “You’ll regret this some day” but I didn’t. From time to time someone would “compliment” me with, “You’d be a great dad.” A sentence I completed —in my head— with “and miserable every day of my life.”
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