Never Give Up

The art can be ripe. The notes can be neat. The scene can be set. The pens can be counted. The gadgets and chargers can be placed in some kind of order. Printed tickets, electronic or otherwise, can be neatly folded and placed into crisp white envelopes. Clothes can be laundered and gutted from polythene. Unfamiliar transit reservations can be checked. The currency exchange can be examined in some kind of non-commercial preparation. Foreign newspapers, the editorials imagined as pertinent, can be finished off. Lists can be culled with the stroke of a pen. Forms of goodbye can be softly spoken. Boots can be polished. Fear can be sublimated. Contingencies can be revealed. An artist's cheek can be kissed. A deep breath made. A pocket patted. A key felt. But nothing can prepare for that moment when something happens out of the blue and causes everything to go pear-shaped, which happens to be exactly what happened to me today. But, and I must repeat this to myself as well, it is precisely how we deal with these unexpected incomings that defines the crisp edges of our abilities and survivalist flexibilities and instinct. My poor artist, though. She, like me, was tuned like an instrument for the 'concert' tonight, but it isn't going to happen. It will. Give it a few more hours, day, or days. We, I, it, will get there. Like life itself, like the artist's search for a show, like the child's pursuit of a dream, like the shuttle racing through the sky, nothing comes easy for those who cannot see where they are heading but know that the not-seeing is part of the deal. But it comes. It does come. It has to come. If you never give up, if you keep the faith, if you hang onto the ledge with your fingernails, you will be rewarded, you will be believed, you will climb back in again. Never, let's say it again, give up.