Strange urges

I should be recording my impulses in this blog. I'd like to reread them months after I have them, and wonder what would have happened, and how everything that is then the future would be different, had I obeyed my own spontaneous desires--strange or subtle or insignificant as they might seem. These are the things I want to remember...the kind of things you miss if you don't listen closely to everything your mind does, and occasionally let yourself stop, grasp the tail of a thought that was just about to wiggle away, and say, "Wait. Let me look at you."

The really important things (the things that get you strange looks if you act on them), like the sudden, powerful impulse to stand up and walk into the next room and make steady eye contact with someone--a friend, a coworker, a stranger, whomever-- and just say "I love you," because you do, because in that moment you know it, and mean it, and know that it won't go away because it doesn't, this kind of love that is not romantic or platonic or situational or filial or erotic love...but something that flows outward from your center as the natural result of who you are. It matters just as much. The love that values everyone you have ever seen or spoken to, and those whose existence means absolutely nothing to you. Love which is pure gratitude that you exist, and an equally ecstatic joy that everything else exists at the same time, in the same space....the feeling that it is enough to be here or anywhere for however long, with whatever else, and to completely surrender to your own gratitude that life has happened to you and everyone and everything living or dead, forever. Love because it's there, inside and outside of you, like breath or blood--a force, a fuel--something living that must be passed on for its own survival, for the survival and existence of everything that ever matters or mattered or will matter. There is no "because" in this kind of love--the closest thing to a reason for loving would be "because we're here, at the same time, and we must, we must love each other now if we want anything to ever be good again."

I wish I could be the kind of hero who follows these impulses--the good ones--the ones that have the potential to rend the threadbare fabric of "reality," and leave a perfect portal through which substance and principle can pass...the ones that change everything in a second, for a second, and forever. I wish I had that kind of courage.