If you're not mine, one less is nine.

I've turned a corner of sorts. It happened all at once, like a butterball turkey ejected at high speed out the back door of a jackknifed semi refrigerator truck barrelling down I-80 in a midwinter high Sierra snowstorm and smashing through the windshield of a compact sedan with a transmission fluid leak. Not really, but wasn't that sentence an adventure?

Anyway. Cold turkeys aside, I realized that I have options. I'm capable of making choices. Now maybe that's an illusion and it's all predestined, in which case the wise thing to do is not to get too attached to expectations, but until I get whacked upside the head with the rattan cane of the Great Zen Master in the Sky, I'll go on ahead with this lovely dream in which I have some say over the nature of my experience.

I've been in a funk. The funk has two levels. One is a level at which I've been operating more or less my whole life, a level which is never entirely devoid of darkness; the other level lies within the particular swing of the seasons, especially winter. Winter is always hard. Darkness finds excuses to seep through. Wherever you're weak, the cold water finds a path, gets down in to where you breathe and changes the tenor of your speech. Oh well.

For whatever reason, I got a wake-up call and was able to hear it. It was nothing new, just a reminder of what I've always known: that whatever my circumstances may be, I have the ability to choose how I will respond. Surrender is my prerogative. I can surrender to optimism as surely as anything else, if that's what I want. Not just an idea. Practice. Exertion. An expenditure of energy that we quantify vaguely as soul force.

All the circumstances of my life coming to bear. My eye surgery. (Gee, what metaphorical significance might that carry?) Teaching the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Fishing for the deep thread between my wife and I. Autonomy: the self-directed expression of conscious, focused desire.

What is it that you actually want?

What are you actually doing to make it happen?

This is not a guilt trip. Don't get defensive. Be open. Be empty. Listen. There is no authority, no one you have to please. These are pixels on a screen, arranged in a configuration that resembles a series of sigils that represents a configuration of sounds that indicates an assemblage of linguistic significance, and you take whatever the hell you want from all of that: confusion, inkling, transcendent realization, boredom. I don't know. It's none of my business. I have no business. You're in control here. No one is making you read this. If you can make that decision, why not any other?

What if?

OK.