As I sat at my table reading this evening (surrounded by flowers, New Yorkers, and a cup of tea--could it be any better?), I watched my cat stretched out peacefully on the floor, paws tucked under her chin and eyes delicately closed in slumber. Breathing, ever so gently: alive. What is life other than one long process of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating, sustaining, dissolving, striving, and stumbling? And yet knowing where one is in the journey is never entirely lucid. Am I at the top of the cliff, dangerously close to the precipice, or am I at the base of the mountain, just beginning a stunning new adventure? Ah, but we find out soon enough!
Unbearable lightness and life-giving heaviness. To be defeated by greater and greater things, to be crushed by what overwhelms and released by what creates tension!
"The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
-Kundera
Tonight the choice is lightness.