Here I am. Exactly where I am supposed to be, because that is where I am. I don’t believe in destiny, but do strongly believe in the luck of fate. Not that I rely on fate, because from Boethius I know that if you tie yourself to the wheel of fate you must accept it when the wheel turns downward. I just accept where I am as where I should be; my life could have come out different, as Jim Harrison wrote, but it didn’t. If I look back at my life, trying to trace the path, trying to make out the moments that brought me to here, the things I would stress today, might not be the ones I would have stressed ten or fifteen years ago. Something that I would have deemed of small consequence then, might loom larger now simply because of who I think I am, my sense of identity: an important aspect of the self that is constantly and forever under reconstruction. A construct that is made from the materials at hand: my memory, my interpretation of that memory, and my interpretations of those interpretations of my present being given, and placed upon me by others.
Lisa asked me the other day, “What would make you happy?” I hadn’t realized until then that I was truly sad, and had been for awhile. Part of it could be my mom’s recent death, but I think that that is not the main cause. I’m frustrated with my job, teaching; frustrated by the end of my doctoral pursuit, even though I am relieved by the end of it.
subtext 