At a certain point in life, you realize that the beginnings aren’t coming anymore. Nor, thankfully, are you so attached to them. All the potential of you starts to slip away, like the plum petals on trees that have ripened enough for the season. What’s left is a simpler kind of happiness, an acceptance of sorts, a messier but acceptable form of contentment. It’s less a path you walk toward some perfectly imagined future than a pond you float on, one adorned by the detritus of days past, which the nearby birds use to build their nests.

Endings, too, lose their appeal. Once, they occupied you with their clear and sudden meaning, in a life more mundane than not. That the days blended together was also a siren song you followed often into despair. No longer do they terrify you—the blurry days, the despair—nor do they threaten your existence. You simply continue on with living: meeting yourself in the mirror each morning, sometimes tired, then by the window, counting petals until a poem begins to form, is formed in the counting.

Grief is the price of admission to this reality. But you learn to let go just in time for what’s coming, knowing that the river has never stopped for anyone. You free yourself from the false hope that you’ll ever be fully ready before you jump in. All the images imprisoned inside of you require heart-work now, for the world wants to flourish in love. Between sugared brick and a salted sky, what’s required is your participation, a swim in the middle of everything.