What if you stood before an enchanting lake on a hot summer day, a cool, enticing lake, and yet don’t step in? All you have to do is strip off your clothes (there’s no one looking, and you don’t care anyway) and plunge yourself into the delicious water and you know you will forget the harshness of the sun, the thirst of your skin, the dust that coats you. You can imagine the water enfolding you in its embrace and you know instinctively that you can trust that you will enjoy every minute of it. Yet, you stand at the water’s edge, looking in, looking around, half-longing, yet holding back.
It’s not that you’re afraid. You know you can probably swim the depths of this lake. Well, you’re not really sure, the water has frightened you in the past–always that fear of drowning. Yet you know that you need to try before you know for sure whether you can swim or not. The only way to confirm or disprove your own fears is by facing them. Yet that’s not why you hesitate. Sometimes you enjoy facing those fears, there is a certain excitement to that sense of drowning, almost running out of breath, before you break the surface and remember to kick your feet and move your arms and fill your lungs with oxygen, eyes stinging with water, yet unable to close them to the light that proves that you’re alive. No, a little fear of drowning could never dissaude you from the rewards of a swim on a summer day.
But the fact is that you would rather stand here and stare at the sparkling water. There is a hint of a quiet breeze rippling the surface of the lake on the otherwise quiet afternoon, but it doesn’t touch you–only stillness all around. The sun is beating down and the grass is letting out that hot humid smell of summer green. Insects dance in a huge column in areas over the grass. And the water beckons. And somehow, this moment is enough. It’s enough to know that the water is there without having to throw yourself into it. It’s enough to imagine the depths of that pool, imagine being deep in its belly and look up to see the sun streaming in, oddly distorted and pretend you’re a fish. It’s enough to imagine all the pleasures of finally escaping the dreadful, sultry day and giving in to the beauty of the water. Somehow there is enjoyment in knowing that this is all the moment will be, that it will remain unfulfilled. Yes, this is enough, just this feeling of anticipation.
Not everything must reach its logical or desirable conclusion, must it?
I couldn’t agree with you more. There is a certain pleasure sought from the unfinished, the undone. But only when one has chosen it to be one’s state of being. The sense of freedom experienced from the exercise of a right so personal.
Loved it. It led me into this state of (sorry!) blissful laziness. Just a moment of remaining as I am, but I had to comment you see!
you know only the other day I concluded that I would like to die under water, because it’s what I love the most.
‘Be still and know that I am God’ ?