Hold Them Lightly

Between expectations and the reality of being human

Maybe I ask too much.

Or maybe I just never arrive
at what I claim to believe in.

No.

That isn’t it.

Or maybe it is.

Because the measure felt so artless.

Mean what you say.
Carry it through.
Do the thing right.

Nothing exotic to require.

Then memory opens its ledger.

Plans left half-built.
Will gone slack.

I’ll mend it later.
Only this once.

The voice inside gets bolder.

You knew the cost.
You swore you’d hold the line.
You called the standard sacred.

So why does it keep slipping?
Why does the grip keep failing?

The questions pile,
quicker,
louder.

The vow.
The lapse.
The alibi.

Until it crests,
and breaks,
and falls quiet.

---

I’ve noticed something in the way
I move through ordinary days.

I carry a private code.

A hush of rules
for how a thing gets done.

Work should carry weight.
A word should hold its shape.
What you start, you finish,
no cut corners, no delay.

Small convictions.

But the world was never built
for that kind of order.

Most days sprawl looser than the plan.

Intentions fray.
Energy thins.
Focus wanders off.

People fall short of themselves.

I’m one of them.

That’s what keeps the whole thing honest,
not some distance I pretend,

because it’s tempting to believe
you’re watching the mess from outside it.

You aren’t.

You’re just another soul
trying to stay steady
in a current
that keeps tugging you
toward the shorter way.

So the tension hums,
low, but constant.

Part of me still holds
that the standard matters.

Another part knows
how hard it is
to live inside one
day by day.

Some mornings the gap shows plain,
what I meant to be
against what I did,
and I feel the difference
sharp and unashamed.

We’re unsteady creatures, all of us.
Sharp for a moment.
Loose the next.
Certain of our worth
until the weather turns.

None of that makes a person ruined.

It only means the frame
was never quite as fixed
as it claimed to be.

That’s where the real fork appears.

You can drop the measure
and drift where the current takes you,
an easier country to live in.

Or you keep the standard,
but you hold it loosely.

Less like a verdict.
More like a direction,
something to walk toward
even on the days you miss it by a mile.

Because the truth of it is:

no one fully becomes
the person their own standard names.

But something goes hollow
if you stop naming one
at all.

So the middle ground
might be the only honest ground there is.

Expect the effort.
Forgive the shortfall.
Try again tomorrow.

Not because trying
will suddenly make you disciplined,

because
without something to aim at,
a person drifts
so easily….

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