April 29
Everything you hope to reach by roundabout ways you can give yourself now — if you do not deny it to yourself: let the past rest, entrust the future to providence, and direct the present alone by justice and temperance.
Meditations XII,1
Listening mode
Everything you hope to reach by roundabout ways you can give yourself now — if you do not deny it to yourself: let the past rest, entrust the future to providence, and direct the present alone by justice and temperance.
Some things you put off not because they would be hard. You put them off because they don't yet seem to be yours by right. First an old matter has to be settled, first it has to be clear how things will go on. Then, as you imagine it, you could be calm, generous and attentive to whatever is in front of you.
The conditions, however, keep renewing themselves. Once one question is answered, the next is already waiting, and calm keeps moving further back along with them. It becomes a reward you save for a state that may never exist in quite that form.
The difficulty is that the past does not settle down on request. An unresolved quarrel stays unresolved. Letting it rest would not mean declaring it finished. You would simply no longer make it a precondition for how you speak to someone today.
Perhaps this very person sends you an inconsequential message asking about a date. You could reply curtly, the old reservation still in your tone. You could also simply name the date.
