Number 159: The Next Thing

The Next Thing

You’ve decided what that is, have you?

Decided you’ll work in the garden or get the oil changed; clean the cat boxes, or meet Suzanne for that cup of coffee the two of you cancelled in June.

You’ve decided how the afternoon will go, one next thing leading into the next next thing like squares on the Candy Land board. There you’ll go, marching with a purpose through the Peppermint Forest of Efficiency straight on up into the soaring Gumdrop Mountains of Everything’s Done.

Imagine yourself there on the sweet summit where the gravel is sugar dust you don’t bother to taste. You won’t mind one bit how you passed through that forest like a ghost, never so much as sniffing a peppermint tree.

Time, after all, is a limited thing. Only so much of it. So many tasks to complete. One always has to be on top of the next, next, next, next thing.

There’s no time to look around and see what might be hiding a few feet off the trail. You have a planner full of pink and blue highlighting that wards off distractions, delays, disturbances and diversions. In the glow of its white pages and crisp blue lines, hindrance and hesitation shrivel and fall away. You hold it to your chest rather like a holy relic tucked inside the armor of a boy going off on crusade.

As though deciding what the next thing will be will ward off all those next things you wish would not be.

So stand there on that graveled mountaintop, the sweet things in life, as usual, trampled beneath your feet, and look at the hawk that is soaring in front of a sun going down.

Feel the catch in your chest like tears you didn’t have time for, who, unwept and, so, unloved, found a place to huddle together in a hollow in your sternum. Who, unwept and, so, unloved, call to you now, like lost and frightened children.

Follow the hawk with your eyes as he flies over the trail through the peppermint trees.

Remember what you saw in the corner of your vision, hiding a few feet off the trail. That lost and frightened child you didn’t have time for.

Time is not a limited thing.

Eons and eons and eons of it have flown by,

waves of time flowing forward and back and out and out and out beyond all vision beyond all hearing beyond all sense or knowledge

humans animals trees atoms rock and bone and nuclei floating free in limitless time

let limitless time catch you up in its talons like a hawk

let the shock of it shake the tears loose

let it fly you down into distraction, diversion, delay to the places where children cry and women are hungry and men need a hand on their shoulder. Let no tears go unwept, unwitnessed, and, so, unloved, let love, like a hawk soaring, carry you off that neat little childish board you’ve made and clung to, into the real thing — the next thing, that, after all that hiding, you find that you’ve been searching for.