lives – Mick Canning

Poem number five in my Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So series. Snow outside, test cricket on the TV, beer in the cupboard. That’s my day sorted, then.

The sea sighs for you tonight.

It sucks at the shingle

And smears your footprints

Like a wet thumb rubbed across writing.

Where once you walked and left your

Prints, it gently wipes the land clean.

Lovingly it lays its cheek to the ground

And nuzzles your memory.

We are more than specks

In the infinity of time and space

Yet somehow we need to

Make sense of our lives.

Rock endures

But so does the wind and the rain.

More so, in fact, since in the end

Mountains are levelled

And the wind and rain remain.

In the end the passage of many feet

May be more durable than

Dwellings of stone.

There is no such thing as fate; not in the sense that something was somehow pre-ordained to happen to us. Always, we have free will.

Always, we can make our own choices.

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People sometimes talk about momentous decisions, about arriving at a crossroads and having to make a choice of some sort, but every moment in life is, in reality, one such crossroads. Even the smallest choices, such as whether to have tea or coffee, or whether to cross over to walk on the sunny side of the street, might have major consequences. Consequences we cannot foresee.

And we do not see the consequences of an alternative choice, because we always make the choice and move on; we can never go back and make a different decision and thereby see how things might have turned out so differently.

And sometimes, those decisions we assume are going to be momentous, are nothing of the sort.

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is not fate, it is chance.

Fate itself is no more than chance.

It is the path that we have chosen, and every single moment we can make choices that will change our lives for ever.

Exciting, huh?