The life

I went inside. The game was there. The urge to go back to it stayed for years. I did not touch it. I set out to spend the hours the game had taken on whatever I believed would hold the most meaning, so that I would have a life. At first the hours went to empty things, to becoming good at something that could lead to a career. The same hours filled with psychology, and with philosophy, and with anything that could make me better. I used my life as the field where I tried the ideas, and I took them further by living them.

From the first building I had been told that life would get better in the next one, and it got worse. I gave the studies seven years. I studied computer science, and I studied fine art, and in the hours they did not own I studied what the buildings never taught. There was a wage for cleaning. I set aside what it left, and put it where money grows when it is set to a real work. It grew faster than the wage. Their schools sell a decade of chairs as the price of money. The money had begun without the decade.

The practice had begun at eighteen, and for seven years it had not yet held a shape. At twenty-five the shape began to hold, and it was a shape that worked. When it was not followed, weakness crept in, or I became lost in my own work. I stopped making things for the sake of the making. I lived the poverty on purpose. I would rather have stayed poor than sold the morning. I walked out of the last school. I had tried the paths. Every one of them rented the hour.

I put distance between myself and the buildings, and the friends, and the family, so the day would have my whole attention. I took the first cheap flight that went far. I did not choose the far place for its name. I was not leaving empty. I already carried a daily practice that let me grow, without money, without a career, and without the comfort they were offering.

I arrived in the night. I would not pay to be carried toward a comfort. I walked a coast with no end chosen except what the path put down. The cold water wanted a body in it, and I went in. I woke, and the food required a fire, so the work began with the light. Before the dark I found the ground I would sleep on. I met people on that path and stayed with them. I lived on very little, while the little I held grew slowly. I needed nothing of the later they had fed me through the whole of my youth. Every day was the best day of my life.

Then I fell. I had taken a shorter way toward a gathering. It was dark. The way became a cliff. I could not go up and I could not go down. I stood there many hours. I called for help. A man climbed up to me, and then he slipped. I went after him. We fell in the dark. I turned my body so my feet would meet the ground if a ground was still there. I hit, and I knew that I had died. I had not. What grew from the rock stopped a second drop that would have finished it. They carried me to a hospital. I left before they were done with me.

I had been living a miracle each day, and if I had died there, nothing would have remained. From that fall I treated every living minute as a dead man walking. The search changed. I would have to find a purpose beyond a great life, so that I could die having given a meaning back. The days of that search grew very dark. Then the first answer came.

Then we were the picture they hold up. A house stood in a village. The children were stable. The income was the ordinary one they call success. I came home, and the children were in the house, and I held them for the hour the evening gave, and I did not have the day back when that hour ended. Most men finish there. They go on renting the day, and they take what the rental permits, and they call the permission a life.

I hold the roof as a treasure. I hold the household as a treasure. Keeping either of them by renting the day would have been the end of me. The evening left me an hour with the children. It did not leave me the time to give the household its direction, or to live the brightness of the life, or to make work that was truly meaningful. I was grateful for the hour. The hour was not enough.