May 11
Don't say the struggle is wholly in vain. / Up front, where you stand, nothing seems to give — / but behind, in silence, fed from far away, / the flood has long been rising and fills the land.
Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Don't say the struggle is wholly in vain. / Up front, where you stand, nothing seems to give — / but behind, in silence, fed from far away, / the flood has long been rising and fills the land.
Sometimes you argue for something over a long time, and the person across from you doesn't budge. You put forward your reasons, patiently at first, more tersely later, and at some point you let it go. From the outside it looks like a defeat. From the inside too.
Months later you hear the same line of thought from someone else's mouth, in a gathering you contributed nothing to. Someone puts it forward as if it had just occurred to him, in words that aren't yours. Perhaps it reached him from you by a roundabout route. Perhaps he got there by an entirely different path. You won't find out.
Here something comes apart that until now you had taken to be one thing: that the matter changes, and that you are proved right. The one can happen without the other following. Only now, perhaps, do you notice how much of your persistence was really aimed at the second.
You could be glad, and you are glad. It's just hard, in this moment, to say nothing.
