Another Choice

Such notions as earlier were considered as indubitable and permanent now seem to be unmoored and lose the sense or their value as evidence.

It is particularly so for this notion, nourished with physical and material facts as it is, that each of us has only this one existence at one’s disposal, has only this one life to live, that there are no other past and future than those of this very body itself which we are – this notion so universally shared has now become, we cannot really say how, almost ludicrous and comic and altogether untenable and profoundly illogical.

How?

How could these few years, these few thousands of days lived in this little fragile body even begin to explain what all the beings are, who they are and wherefrom they have come and whereto they go – let alone their differences?

***

It is possible for these upheavals and reversals to take place in a subliminal fashion and for one to remain housewife, bank clerk, heavy truck driver or esthetician, and no revolt to ensue.

For it is a matter of something else.

Of another listening, another attention and another receptivity.

Only, now and then, singular coincidences arise as if to reveal an invisible action in the very cloth of our instants.

***

One may also find oneself disoriented and disarrayed and feel a distress so incommunicable that one may fear for one’s sanity and balance and of running altogether astray.

And then, perhaps on that winter morn, an absent neighbor’s sister gently asks us to safe keep for him a satchel of books and, just as we lay it on the table in the hall, one title shows and attracts our attention and we take this volume in our hands and open it and what we read

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