Status Updates From Ongoingness: The End of a D...

Often I believe I'm working toward a result, but always, once I reach the result, I realize all the pleasure was in planning and executing the path to that result.
It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me—that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing.

Marriage isn't a fixed experience. It's a continuous one.
It changes form but is still always there, a rivulet under a frozen stream. Now, when I feel a break in the continuity of till death do us part, I think to myself, Get back in the river.

In my diary I recorded what had changed since the previous day, but sometimes I wondered: What if I recorded only what hadn't changed? Weather still fair. Cat still sweet.
Cook oats in same pot. Continue reading same book. Make bed in same way, put on same blue jeans, water garden in same order.... Would that be a better, truer record?

I could have protected the document with a password or padlocked or hidden the computer, but I didn't care enough to inconvenience myself. The diary wasn't a trove of secrets; it was, simply, everything. I might as well have hidden myself from view. I still don't care whether anyone reads it.

I didn't want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldn't face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment. That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure— when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time.

Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness (Posición en Kindle355-358). Edición de Kindle.