keyword: moan, title: rote memorization in misc. flash fiction

This life is a series of lessons on the subject of letting things go. Avoid learning these lessons at your own peril because the lessons will continue to be taught, whether you want to accept their truth or not. You have to learn how and when to let go.

Ignore the curriculum and it will only hurt worse, these lessons will only become harsher and harsher yet, this is the pattern I’ve noticed over forty years’ time. I’m not certain why this is the focus of life, I don’t know who or what’s behind it, if there’s anything in charge at all, but these lessons are the drumbeat behind each of our everythings. There is time, of course, to bitch and to moan but in the end, you have to learn how and when to let go.

You lose family, you lose friends. You lose loved ones, you lose dreams and that’s what this life seems to be. A rhythm of that, a melody of that, a pattern, a recurrent roadmap of loss, each time reminding to lose with a little more dignity this time. To lose with a bit more grace this time. To lose with less bitterness and less false hope this time because if you can, the next time will hurt less. Maybe only a bit less but still a little bit less nonetheless, maybe it’s training us to deal with our own deaths, that final letting go of all things. You have to learn how and when to let go.

Maybe we’re learning the ability to in the end accept our own oblivion, as a kind of relief, as an exhausted release, training us to be able to take the last punch with this drumbeat of small jabs over a lifetime, the million slings and arrows of outrageous fortune slowly inoculating us for the haymaker blow of what dreams may still come. You have to learn how and when to let go.

After all, this life’s amazing. This life’s transcendently beautiful. This life’s so jaw-dropping extraordinary when you have the time to just stop and breathe, even if you’ve rarely the time to just stop and breathe, even if you only get a very short time to begin with, this life is glorious to the point where it would of course be extraordinarily hard to let go of with a sense of peace. So, to balance the ledgers of life’s glories with time’s brevity, to prepare us for absence of all these god damned wonders so very soon, the universe provides the mercies of these lessons. Whether you like it or not, whether you do or do not want it so, you have to learn how and when to let go.

I’ve tried to ignore these lessons myself, heart-drunk as I’ve been on how wonderful this life can be, trying to convince myself things never end, but with every day, I’m trying to learn it, myself. I’m trying to learn how and when to let go.