“Write a poem about something you’ve done … that gave you a … kind of satisfaction.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-two-11/)
I always thought I’d grow up
to live a life of the mind.
My childhood body burdensome,
never as easily athletic
as my classmates, never able
the same ways I envied in them.
I dove into books: scifi, fantasy,
not so much for their escape
but as a gym for my mind:
to wrestle with complexity,
to grapple with how
the world could be different.
In third grade, I wrote an essay
on what I wanted to be when I grew up:
When I Grow Up, I Want to Be
a Cosmologist! (So proud to know
that word, even then I knew I was
too young for people to expect that!)
Laying awake in bed, thinking about
time, existence, beginnings and ends,
the incomprehensible counter-intuitive
complexity of quantum reality,
thinking about death and recurrence,
of God’s creation of time from eternity,
and even then I knew a life of the mind
was the best place I could live.
Then came music, and theater, and dance,
mosh pits, and martial arts, and manual labor,
and I found my body is remarkably able,
lithe and strong and agile,
and I could be as effortless as
I always thought my classmates were.
And I learned my mind works better
when I’m moving, and I didn’t expect that.
I still think about time, but measure it now
with breath and heartbeats and foot falls,
and I know how existence feels when my body
swirls through space to the rhythm
of someone else’s music, and how time
and recurrence manifest in the thrilling
contractions of muscle fibers.
Everything that exists is motion
and I celebrate my cosmology
in the movements only my body can make.
John the Librarian 