Sometimes I Look at Life From the Edge of a Cliff

Sometimes I look at life from the edge of a cliff. I dream of drawing water from wells whose bottom I cannot see. I climb to the moon in a single step and cannot come down for months. Like a grain of sand in the desert I wait for a wind blowing the way I want to go, so I can let myself travel. Then I am afraid the wind will change halfway.

I stop. I try to understand people. What they call devotion one day they call cruelty the next. I cannot follow it. Saying to someone that life should not be this hard, I notice that what makes life hard is seeing it as easy, belittling it. In that moment I cannot get out of the paradox.

Then I think: why should I get out? Perhaps this paradox is the meaning of life. Sometimes you care, magnify, consider, labour; and sometimes life is like hitting a ball just as it comes.

Sometimes what I do is try to show the writing on the water to the one who says I am writing on water. Instead of explaining that the water I write on is not the water of this world, that this water exists precisely to be written upon, I struggle to make them see the writing.

And even if you succeed, the truth that writing on this water cannot be sullied stays a romantic notion. I cannot explain it. Neither my tongue nor my mind suffices. Sometimes the past will not let you be understood.

Then a line of Tanpınar comes to mind. Whatever my past may be, from where I stand today it feels like an entire problem. I can neither escape it nor be wholly in its service.

Because I am stuck in the past? No. Because one gets stuck in the past.

You look as if to ask what this has to do with anything. This: every file you leave unclosed comes back to you under other names, in other events, in other shapes. And because of what stands in front of you, you cannot see what stands behind it.

As long as you cannot look beyond the visible, your guide is not your heart but your eyes. Those who act on what the eye sees cannot light the darkness of the future. For only the one whose guide is the heart arrives at the dreams within it.

The eye, as Uncle Einstein said, only takes you from point A to point B. Imagination takes you everywhere.

Be well.