A Splendid Sufficiency
You know that moment when you realize
it’s just not going to be your day, week, year
or even life – it hasn’t happened the way you planned,
and that’s okay because what has happened is nice enough,
maybe too nice for someone like you (to be quite honest),
and all that planning and dreaming wasn’t for naught
because it taught you to hope for tomorrow, not just more,
and you learned to enjoy not travelling to Europe,
sleeping in smelly youth hostels, eating bread and yogurt
that tasted nothing at all like the food Mom fed you,
hitchhiking to Kathmandu to the feces covered monkey temple
although you’re still convinced that would have been nice,
and somewhere around Ayers Rock in Australia
your true self is still waiting to dream about stars with you,
that volcano in Chile is dormant until you ascend
in bright sunshine and thinner air, to burp some lava
from deep in earth’s crust just so you can say you were there;
there are hundreds and hundreds of things you never did,
and so many people you just missed and never will meet,
but that’s still okay because if you’d have done it all
you would have burst from life’s gluttony and never realized
that dreams fill you up quite enough if you let them.
James Callahan 