By now I think I ought to have what it takes to do what I am doing, to deal with the various challenges of life. But so many things still feel like an adventure (that is the more optimistic term) and I need to find new resources and develop new skills. I like the poem “Transcendental Etude” by Adrienne Rich, from the book The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974 – 1977 (Norton, 1978). Here is an excerpt:
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study,
as if learning natural history or music,
that we should begin with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying the hard ones,
practicing till strength and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once
before we’ve even begun to read or mark time,
we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born….
