The Grind

It's rough business this life shit. It's hard enough to just survive it but seeing it through with your soul intact, well, that’s a whole other story.  Jung said the opus takes three things: action, insight, and endurance. The first is a matter of desire, the second, talent, but it's the third that separates the men from the boys.

Sometimes I just want to quit.  Hang a big sign on my psyche that says gone fishin'. Oh, to be free from the grind. Not just the grind of rent and bills but the big grind, the eternal grind, the vast, cosmic grind of the self. The grind of who I think I am and what I think I need. I don't want to fight that war anymore. I want to go fishin’. Build me a raft, head down river and be both Huck and Jim. A raft made of giant pencils I no longer write with unless it's mindless scribbles I read to the leaping trout.

I want to quit. Not as a coward, but as a visionary. Leap over every obstacle like a Fedora wearing gazelle. Only there is no over, only through. I tried over. I tried over, under, and around. I tried two doors down and up a flight of stairs. I tried over the river and through the woods and down an alley but none of it worked, and in the end I was left battered and babbling, right back kneeling before the grind. Begging for another chance to make my bed and fold my laundry. Because there's only the grind.  That's all there is. Whatever your grind may be. Even if it's picnics every day and parties every night. Even if it's sitting on Leonard Cohen's knee, chanting Buddhist madrigals on top of Mount Baldy, it's still a grind. A ceaseless, Sisyphean grind. That's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And no matter how hard you try, you can't escape it, ‘cause trying to escape it is the most brutal grind of all.