Giving up some things
is the key to gaining others.
That’s what we learned
in our tender years,
as childhood faded into the West,
like a late summer sunset,
that burned golden,
until the stars came out.
We knew it in our hearts.
A cold, dead fact
that we were going to have
to learn to grieve,
lest it overcome us.
This part of life would die.
We knew that it was one
of the unavoidable facts of life
since our senior year.
College, university, trade school,
each of them, a milestone
that led us further and further away
from those warm, summer nights.
Some of us refused.
We clung to that juvenile identity
and tried to fool time
into passing us by.
We kept the drugs,
the booze, the dreams,
but every year they faded
and frayed a little more
around the edges.
Everyone pays a price.
For some, it is time,
but others pay with their souls.
We knew that the next step
was a leap of faith
that we had to make
clean,
on the first try.
You couldn’t hang on
to the past,
and you couldn’t carry anything
with you.
You had to run,
and jump,
and pray you made it.
Some just didn’t go.
Others, hung on
to some small thread
of whom they had been,
only to have that line
snap taut mid-leap
and down they’d go.
The best of us
emptied their hearts,
and emptied their hands,
and ran with total abandon,
springing into the air
at the last second,
soaring over the gap,
and came in for a rough landing
on the other side.
There were no judgements,
no scoring,
or metric for measuring performance.
Adulthood is not graded,
or critiqued
by Monday morning quarterbacks.
Sure, we are all judged in the eyes of others,
but those judgements
are only our burden
if we pick them up.
“Success” becomes a strange slogan,
by which the sharks and charlatans
of the world
sell us their ideas.
Pimps and politicians
all want another body
in their stable.
Funny thing is,
most of us made it over
to the other side.
Some fell
and had to find another way up,
but we’re here none the less.
Here, on this side of the great divide,
the only thing that matters
is time,
because we don’t know
how many more
sunrises and sunsets
we’re going to get.
We just do our best
to make every moment good.
Hang on to what’s important
and let go of what’s not.
Another leap,
another great divide
is up ahead, somewhere.
We know it.
So, here’s to being ready for it
when it’s our time to jump.
HG – 2022
