But What If I Don't Want to Build Something?

My eyes squint in the sun, eager for the sunset when the mountain finally envelopes the orb. I feel the air change instantly. A cool moment of relief. My limbs and skin come back to me.

It’s in these slices of being that definitions cease to exist. I wonder if I really have to do anything, if the striving is all one great con. Why is it our lives are marked by tombstones—giant, heavy plaques synonymous with substance? There’s a masculine churning behind what we’re told has worth. How big you’ve built it, how much you’ve saved. Life is in constant pursuit of measuring up. (But to who? And why them?)

Then there’s the feminine; it’s a free and a flow. Smelling the gardenia. Catching the moon rise. How the orange peel gives beneath my nail. Fleeting just the same, but somehow these instances anchor me deeper, feeling more real than the hard bottom line. Maybe they’re magic precisely because they’re everywhere. They flicker to power and in the same wave they disappear. Building nothing, you only sense them when you’re still.