Maybe It’ll Come Back Again

Once you get it, you want to keep it.

Wanting to keep it, you lose it.

Having lost it, you want to, work to, get it back again.

You look for a little help with this.

There are extraordinary amounts of advice on how to beat the losing cycles—how to get it and keep it, how to keep it by not fearing losing it, how to keep it by not wanting to try to keep it, by not thinking about it, or simply not losing it by focusing instead on doing other, finer things with your attention, socially valuable things for others that will, in the doing of them, as sheer, lovely byproduct, get you it back and may let you keep it.

You can’t possibly absorb all the advice.

You try to filter their suggestions for the way to get on with your life, either by choosing to follow a long tradition, or by adopting what feels intuitively right, or by comparison of different sources and types of advice.

Careful examination of the available biographical information about well-known advice-givers rarely shows any exceptional arc of perfection in their lives, patterns of getting it and keeping it without ever losing it, once they learned to follow the right advice.

Eventually, advice-givers died and stopped giving advice.

Seeing this, you may become resigned, in principle, to your personal cycle of getting it, exactly it, exactly right, then wanting to keep it, losing it, then trying to get it again.

In practice, you’d still really just like to keep it, assuming you get it.

You’re embarrassed by the selfishness.

Still, if someone asks you how you got it and how it is, in their eyes at least, you have managed to keep it, you glow a little bit.

You could be an advice-giver!

You glow a little bit. That’s it, you’ve got it. Now, don’t think about it. Be it. Have at it. Get on with it.

There it went.