What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
Feels like it’s been March this whole time.
Disaster anniversaries are a special kind of shock to the system. They mark time. They mark us. And we should mark them, in turn.
What were you doing, a year ago? What were you planning, hoping, expecting?
I was in San Francisco, reviewing portfolios for the CatchLight Fellowship. I spent the weekend with friends and then flew to New York for a board meeting. Immediately after that, back to Vegas to for a frantic final packing sprint before moving to Texas to start a new role in a new city.
It was the last normal time, though even then I remember being extra tense in the airport and on that last flight to Austin.
I wasn’t expecting that would be the last time I’d be on a plane for a long while, me who’d been flying into or out of one airport or another at least once every other week for months.
I was expecting all the usual challenges of a new job. I didn’t predict any of what was to follow, what has followed.
I am still here. Time marches on.
Attribution:
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?— from “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay