We are what we are not – that is the great surprise. I am the roads I did not take, the kisses I withheld, the words I did not speak. As with an old gingerbread mold, my absences become presences, my divots dimples. “If only” is ambition’s inevitable epitaph.

                  That first sentence barged into my rest. I shooed it in favor of sleep, but it would not go. “If you do not set me down,” it smiled weirdly, “you’ll be the one who didn’t. And who knows – these words may be those you’d have been remembered by! 

                  Spooked I opened my book.

                  Every choice is consequential – that is the burden of consciousness. Dog-pal Henry knows no regret because he perceives no choices. He does what makes sense and that is that. Do some decisions disappoint? Of course, but so what? That was then and now is now.

                  We may console ourselves we had no more choice than one plus two equals three – but that is evasion. We always have a choice; as the Stoics observed, we choose to live. To depict oneself as a victim – “the Devil made me do it!” – is to shirk responsibility. Who does not squirm at Hamlet’s extenuation to Laertes? 

                                                    What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd.

We’ve been there watching Hamlet behave and misbehave for three hours – and now he says it wasn’t he?

                  The more we ponder, the more responsibility ripens into quandary. Am I composing these words? Evidently – no one else is near but Jane, who’s sleeping, and Henry, who cannot type. But who made the maker of these words? What wormed these thoughts into his head? Why did he speak thus and not otherwise? Am I writing what my father never could – or saying what my moment means to say – or prattling to seem smart? Or all or none of the above?

                  Most folks don’t wrestle such thoughts because why bother? What is, is, make the most of it. I love paddling in this murk because it teaches me to think. That is my strange delight. I love others who’ve tried before me, fellow trekkers past the frontier. My words record our adventure.

                  Morality emerges from my discoveries. The psalmist got it right: “I am a worm and no man” – who can deny it? Well then, how to deploy my unimportance for its best result – because surely, we want to make the most of our chance. Consult my capacities, conscience, the needs of my hour. We are all consumers – of the stuff of life – but what might I contribute? Thought nudges me toward the Sermon on the Mount and the conclusions of sages. (Wisdom mostly concurs.) Compare my performance with what it might have been, my tribe’s performance to its potential. Hair-raising, no? How can we do better?

                  Makers of art are showoffs, q.e.d. – we strive for admiration. But beyond our need for endorsement, we strive to make sense, each in our way, with the absurdity of being. If I can make a picture – or tune – or poem – of my moment, momentarily it might seem to make sense. We are fooling ourselves, of course – existence makes no sense – but it’s soothing, the anodyne of meaning, and helps us sleep.