If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. - Ursula K. LeGuin

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Passages

She had been thinking, and the thought came back like the turntable coming round, that it was hard, or anyway she found it hard, to realize that what you did was usually just done once. Once and for all. That doing something wasn't just a kind of practice for something that would keep happening, but was what would happen, was what happened. You didn't get to practice.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
I stumbled across this paragraph a few weeks ago. As I've mentioned, I'm re-reading my way through my Le Guin collection. This was in a book of short stories and it struck me because it sums up a lot of how I've been feeling about motherhood lately.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So true! It's not a practice, is it? This one hit me like a thump. I can't say that I have any "major" regrets, but I'd love to be able to go back to certain days and change the way I reacted or handled things. Now I can only look at the situation through older and wiser eyes. The good news is that memory tends to soften things, so my daughter doesn't remember those things I'd like to change. She tends to remember the things I did right, which is a blessing to me.

Thanks for this quote. It made my morning.