It’s the last day of Think Kit ’16. It’s an ending, so this prompt seems appropriate: Give us the final sentence, paragraph, or chapter of your life story.
Is it possible to even imagine providing the wrap-up thoughts to something (a life) that’s hopefully no where near its conclusion?
It seems inappropriate, in a way, to think about the end. A little morbid. A little presumptuous. The end of a life feels like it should be a surprise, a thing we all know is going to happen but aren’t really supposed to be thinking about until it’s here.
And then we turn that thinking over to other people, to decide what it’s all about.
Maybe I should be relishing this opportunity to tell you what my life might mean.
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On the first day of Think Kit ’16 I mused about intrinsic delight: At that age the allure of accolade didn’t have the pull it has come to have, so many years later, and in that way I had no need for approval. This was a time of intrinsic delight.
So I ask myself: is the narrative following that opening about the loss of intrinsic delight? The complication of this? The navigation between an internal and external life, about control, about meaning, about what matters and can matter and how it comes to do this?
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I am a person of . . . I don’t want to say simple pleasures so much as I want to say random pleasures.
It is odd little things that charm me.
As I drove to the place where I am sitting to write this post, a car ahead of me passed over a leaf in the road, causing it to swirl up into the air in front of me. I was entranced by the accidental energy, the tornadic swirl of something that has long been dead, lifeless.
Motionless.
Meaningless.
But no more, revived by my own pleasure in what had happened.
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I am here, I am happening. What I will come to be by the time it’s all over is uncertain but what I can say is this: what I extracted from this life was uniquely, weirdly mine.
And that is a great satisfaction.
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This post is part of Think Kit by SmallBox. Today’s prompt: We started with a first line, so let’s wrap up our month with the last. Give us the final sentence, paragraph, or chapter of your life story.
Jackie Lutzke 