How

This article details the how.  How a life can tumble away from itself.

Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist's Way, suggests that God, or god, or "god," or the universe, has a pact with us about our creativity: if we take care of the quantity (the rate of creative output), god will take care of the quality.

Universe, if I take care of the present, please take care of my future.

I honestly have not been tending the present.

I have been whitewashing my past so its events look like guidance, rearranging it like it is all throw pillows on a couch.

I have been looking at a face fifty years from now, features grown subtle under soft flesh.

I have been flinching at forty, at what my life won't be because I've miscalculated my trajectory every time I've aimed.

I forgot, all this time, that half my life ago, I swore I wouldn't collapse around career, marriage, children.

I swore I wouldn't fold up all of my existence and measure it against three data points.

I didn't know then how difficult it would be to strike out alone and walk a course undefined.

Life gives us models to make life more efficient.

I feel like I have no model to follow.

I have to carve it myself and, like Michelangelo, chip away all the parts that are not David.