The Secret of All Things
Look into her eyes with your patented special look and she, it’s as if she were tired and staring at a generic work of art in an airport waiting room two hours into a five hour layover. Surrounded by cranky babies.
Or, you try to strike up a conversation with someone and you’re so hoarse with trepidation they keep saying, What? What?
Or they’re mobbing you at work.
Or you go into a bookstore, killing time, getting out of the rain, and you start opening books, looking inside, looking for a book the reading of which will cure you of being an asshole. You remember the feeling, you used to get it all the time when you were younger, but none of these books give you that feeling. They hang limply from the shelves, like Dali clocks.
Or you beg someone to do something important and they keep saying, No. No.
Or your habitat is getting boring, or confining, or you can smell a potential mate around the corner and you want out but it’s escape-proof.
The secret is this: there are three things you must do – try, and try, and try.
Don’t stop trying, ever.
There’s no hurry, not necessarily.
It’s not about doing it fast, it’s about doing it.
You must know what you want. Once you know this, you do it. That is the secret of all things.
Say you want out but they have placed an empty planter to block the only exit.
It is unclimbable. It is over your head. And if you were to climb over, you’d fall inside and be stuck again, only worse.
So here is what you do: you fucking climb over anyway.
Think Steve McQueen bouncing that ball, baby.
Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce.
You scale the outside of the planter a hundred times, and fall back down a hundred times. They laugh at the persistent turtle.
Tortoise, assholes, you think. Persistent tortoise.
Then, one day, they find you inside the planter. They pick you up and put you back into your habitat.
Some might think, All for nothing. But not you. That is part of the secret.
They find you inside the planter a few more times. Every time, they gently pick you up and put you back into your high-security flowerbed.
Until one day. The day you finally taste freedom. Because you never give up climbing. It’s beyond hope, beyond persistence. You just know what you want to do, and you do it.
Climb over the planter. Maybe you fall in, but you climb back out on the hundredth try, or the thousandth. And you’re free! You are outside!
Or, you would be, if they hadn’t plugged the hole under the fence with the concrete pig. Goddamn it.
But, in principle, the secret always works.