Where am I going in life?
My journey is a restless track veering through detours and dead ends, starts that flare like struck matches only to gutter in the wind, breakdowns by the roadside where memory itself becomes a broken wheel, and backward steps that retrace the same rutted path; it is wearying, and often I stumble beneath the discouragement, yet at times the hardship glimmers like some vast challenge flung down before me, a mountain I might still ascend, while at other hours I sink in the morass of hopelessness, fettered by old torments that cling like ivy and still shape my gestures in the present day. At the waning of last year I recognized with a start that I had let myself go adrift, neglected the garden of both mind and body, surrendered to a gray fog of depression that pressed me flat, arrested my stride, and barred the road to all I had once vowed to reach. Since then I have turned again to the work of gathering and reshaping, recommitting myself to the slow labor of body, thought, and spirit alike, as though I were piecing together a shattered icon from scattered fragments of glass. And though I falter and begin anew, though it seems I am forever at the threshold, the road stretches on, and still I walk it—the journey does not cease, it continues, swelling forward with the stubborn pulse of life.