The heart still lusts for things, for objects to purchase and hold and own. This inescapable desire: it returns and returns, unforgiving in its relentless pursuit of our attention. I ask Jonathan why is he so angry.

Figures don’t fit the reality: Career and money is, if not spectacular, damn good. Not much burdens or responsibilities. He just gave up drinking, even socially (well, maybe not just - it has been a couple of months - but he only told me yesterday over lunch). Fantastic relationship with his sister Ben (something I never had with my own sister, eleven years my senior; nothing I regret - I’ll always be her children’s favourite uncle and that must mean something).

But it’s okay: numbers don’t always add up. There is no linear logic in life.

Jonathan wonders how I can give it all up. (Have I, really?) There is no choice, at least, no other option I can canvass right now. This moment is all. There is a slow, simmering realization that, yes, I, we, only have this one life after all. What I could have done with it. What I have done already; what I regret. Thing is, even with the regrets, I can find some means of seeing that it, like a link in a chain, has connected me to my present, has led me here. That matters, cos this is all the reality I have. No “what if?”s. (Not anymore.) It can be hard to resist the pull of speculation but that path, as wiser men have said, leads only to madness.

This is now; giving in isn’t giving up. It’s letting go (or trying to, anyway, and I ought get points for that if nothing else) of all the expectations that like rope burns and bind. Not just the expectations of Others, but worse yet, so late did I realize this, my expectations of myself. We betray ourselves too easily, I fear.

Becomes a rhythm, a habit, a life, to set standards and to toe the line. To falter is to fail. Yet I have discovered achievement, results, success, these fragmentary ideas are passing pleasures. Nothing lasts when nothing truly connects.

So I wonder now, what have I deprived myself? What have I not allowed myself to do, to be? It is not too late, no, not too late, to give in and to follow my heart. Here is not to expect, to not prepare for wickedness and disaster; after all that is the beauty of no future.