If You Look At A Lot Of

Sometimes It Seems That The Fate Of The World Is Decided Entirely In The Ether Of Electronic Communications And Corporate Backroom Deals.

How Do You Calculate Upon The Unforeseen? It Seems To Be An Art Of Recognizing The Role Of The Unforeseen, Of Keeping Your Balance Amid Surprises, Of Collaborating With Chance, Of Recognizing That There Are Some Essential Mysteries In The World And Thereby A Limit To Calculation, To Plan, To Control. To Calculate On The Unforeseen Is Perhaps Exactly The Paradoxical Operation That Life Most Requires Of Us.

When Someone Doesn't Show Up, The People Who Wait Sometimes Tell Stories About What Might Have Happened And Come To Half Believe The Desertion, The Abduction, The Accident. Worry Is A Way To Pretend That You Have Knowledge Or Control Over What You Don't--and It Surprises Me, Even In Myself, How Much We Prefer Ugly Scenarios To The Pure Unknown. Perhaps Fantasy Is What You Fill Up Maps With Rather Than Saying That They Too Contain The Unknown.

Musing Takes Place In A Kind Of Meadowlands Of The Imagination, A Part Of The Imagination That Has Not Yet Been Plowed, Developed, Or Put To Any Immediately Practical Use…time Spent There Is Not Work Time, Yet Without That Time The Mind Becomes Sterile, Dull, Domesticated. The Fight For Free Space — For Wilderness And Public Space — Must Be Accompanied By A Fight For Free Time To Spend Wandering In That Space.

The Art Is Not One Of Forgetting But Letting Go. And When Everything Else Is Gone, You Can Be Rich In Loss.