Anam Cara

To Keep the Contours of Choice Porous

Though choice deepens and incarnates a way of life, your soul and imagination have an immensity and diversity that can neither be reduced to nor accommodated in your chosen path. If you neglect your own immensity, your life-path itself becomes repressive and unnatural. It cannot unfurl in its own natural rhythm. You have to push your way through; your life becomes over-deliberate. Every action and movement has to be forcibly chosen. You try to keep yourself together. You do not feel that you have taken a wrong path. No. This is the way life is. One cannot drift endlessly. Eventually some direction must be taken. That is all you have done. Yet you feel disproportionately disappointed; it is as if you have given up something that was unfairly demanded of you. Eventually it becomes easier. You have made the compromise that everyone seems to have to make at a certain point. You do not have to force yourself as you did at the beginning. Gradually something seems to close off within you and habit takes over so smoothly. Now it all happens automatically. You have achieved cohesion and stability in your life, but you have paid an awful price—the death of your longing and the loss of the future you long for.