Poem
THE SLIGHTEST IMPROVEMENT
Maybe we’ve mistaken
how things change.
We wait for the great event,
the visible turning,
the hour announcing itself
as the hour everything became different.
But the hour doesn’t.
The old life and the new
may occupy the same room
for a while.
The same chair.
same window.
same unanswered question.
And yet something has moved.
Not the whole world, maybe,
but the place from which
you meet the whole world.
A fraction less resistance.
A little more space
around the thing you fear.
One thought no longer
closing the door completely.
Maybe.
Maybe this isn’t the end
of the story.
Maybe I don’t need
to know what comes next.
Maybe what I’m asking for
isn’t somewhere in the distance
waiting to be reached,
but already here
in some unfinished form,
asking to be noticed.
We’re always standing
at this threshold:
between what has been
and what hasn’t yet
spoken its own name.
And maybe manifestation
is less an act of dragging
the future toward us
than becoming quiet enough
to recognize the future
already entering.
Through a changed thought.
A softened hand.
The sudden absence
of an old certainty.
Don’t ask for the whole road.
There are turns in a life
that begin with almost nothing.
A door left slightly open.
A different answer
to an ancient question.
The smallest willingness
to believe that what has been
needn’t be what will be.
Follow that opening.
The life you’re waiting for
may already be arriving
in the smallest change
in how you’re waiting.