Mind the Gaps

Every so often as a teenager I would feel overcome by personal failures. This would culminate in an evening spent in recrimination and prayer as I tried to stoke the embers of idealism against the chill of disappointment. After a few hours of listening to my favorite music, I would feel renewed fiery ambition. In that spirit of fervor, I often scribbled hasty notes full of schedules and goals to guide my new life. At last I would go to sleep secure in my hopeful exhaustion that this time would be different. And yet each time I rose the following morning to look at the notes I had left myself, they seemed as foreign as if they’d been written by an alien hand. I had passed through the low valley and traversed the high peak, and both had left me unscathed. For good or for ill nothing had changed.  I was as I had always been.

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