Take the thorny, inconvenient step. Create a mess outside your usual jurisdiction.
Stop leaning on the learned practices that have kept the seams of duty
tight as they are. Divorce yourself from the false betrothals of ceremony and disrupt
each tidy garden plotted assumptively by your predecessors. The change
will do you good, birth a blush on your cheeks and a slight tremor in your legs,
the kind that reminds you these particular muscles are far from atrophied.
You are not merely the sum of your inheritances, an agreement made on the merits
of habit. You are the same oyster you tell your children the world is theirs to crack,
the one waiting for the tide to turn, slippery and possible,
every grain of salt winking in the sunlight.
Posted by kind permission of the poet.
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