I've been reading a book of a huge ass collection of John Steinbeck's letters. In one of them, he is responding to a letter his son wrote to him when he was a college student and thought he was in love for the first time and didn't know what to do. In the letter, closer to the beginning he writes:
There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you -- of kindness and consideration and respect -not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had.
He goes on. But at the very end, the very last thing he says to his son is:
And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens. The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
And he's right.
Each one of those last sentences.
Every tic-toc second of life proves that he's right.
k.
Photo: Art piece by Su Blackwell inspired by The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
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