It’s like any new landscape. At first,
You don’t know which direction to look.
Each time you look east, you regret
you can’t at the same time look west.
Soon you become a spinning top, unable
to focus anywhere without wanting to turn
and see what you’re missing. For a time,
it serves you, this willingness to see every side,
keeps you from making poor choices. But then,
spinning and spinning becomes dizzying.
What would it be like, you wonder,
to make a clear choice and then walk
that direction and never look back?
And so you try it—at first by forcing yourself
to look only one way. It’s not easy to walk
a straight line when you’ve been spinning.
Then you begin to notice how good it feels
to put one foot in front of the other
and walk a single course. It is, after all,
all a single person can do. How easy, now
that you’re not always looking away,
how easy to notice every detail about this landscape,
to revel in each step, to focus being
here, and now here, and only here.
