For once, or perhaps finally, the facts of my life seem beside the point. Yes, the disagreement with a good friend that consumed most of a week turned out to be a simple miscommunication. But one hard-won act of reclamation cannot alone compensate for all the losses that just yesterday bedeviled me. Objectively, whole worlds of connection continue to be lost: work, friendship, public platforms.
So how is it possible that today, every resentment, every jealousy, every regret seems unwarranted? Every transgression forgiven? Today, I sit here in this new, wholly unexpected place, wishing everybody well. It is as though everything that has happened to me—not just recently, but since the jolt of my first breath–has been in service of something.
Like sand paper: the abrasion of life has affected the removal of all but the essential. Every fact on the list—the chaos, the rejection, the wounding: grains of sand that scrape and file to reveal the smoothed contours of what had been hidden, waiting to be revealed.
This shift, which seems so sudden today but has taken the whole of my life, requires not a single adjustment of history or biography to finally deliver long sought-after joy. This glimpse of essence is beyond the facts of anything of our world, and certainly beyond anything of my doing.
The facts of my life: revealed, glorious and more or less irrelevant.
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