Such a list as I am in the midst of making is like emotional yoga, stretching and limbering heart fibres, wringing-out tears to wet my pillow. I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know what the point is. I do know that it hurts.
But the hurt is not a bitter fruitless agony, like pancreatic cancer. It is not a destruction of me, it is reclamation of me. This list returns to me parts of myself which I left abandoned in storage, for… who knows why; out of fear—certainly, for the temporary comfort of preventing tears—absolutely, for the convenience of neatly stuffing out of sight the clutter of real life—no question.
I don’t regain any of the lost days, I can’t resume any of the loves that could have been more, and I cannot retrieve any of the opportunities that I lost to the one continuous mistake of my imperfection. Regaining, re-doing, rewinding–none of this is the point; seeking perfection, too, is futile.
My goal—if I have one, and even that is evolving as my list grows—is to plunge in, like a Swede dashing from a sweat lodge to an icy pool. Or maybe my goal is to finally leap off into unsupported space, in completion of the urge described by Carl Jung: If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.