The Weight You Can Put DownChapter 21 of 224 min
A day that ends well
You have put the chain on the door. The kitchen light is off, the hall light is off, and there is one lamp still on in the room you are sitting in.
Nothing here asks the day to have been a good one. Most of them are not. Today may have been largely waiting, and a programme you did not follow, and somebody who said they would ring.
Here is the difficulty you have been having, and it is not a flaw in you. You have been trying to finish a life well.
Nobody has ever managed it. Not for want of time — because a life is not the sort of thing anybody finishes. There is no evening on which you stand at the end of it and look back down the whole length and see how it came out. The only people who ever see a whole life are people who were not in it, and they have only the parts they happened to be present for.
What you have been living in is days.
A day has edges. It starts, it goes on too long, and it stops. You can tell when one has ended.
You have ended about thirty thousand of them. And if you go back over the worst of them you will find they ended too: the day of the funeral ended, the day somebody said the thing you have never repeated ended, the afternoon in the corridor outside the ward ended. Every one. On time.
And here is the part worth having. You did not end any of them. Not one. You have never in your life had to finish a day. They finish themselves, at the same rate, whether or not you got anywhere, whether or not anybody rang, whether or not a single thing was resolved. Tonight will do it again in a few hours with no help from you.
All of that runs backwards only. The life that happened is finished and is not going to be anything else. Tomorrow is not finished, and the number of whoever you have not rung has not changed.
So a day that ends well is not the same as a day that went well. The two have almost nothing to do with one another. A day ends well when the things in it are on the floor instead of in the bed — and on the nights that does not happen, the day still ends, exactly on time, and nothing is marked down.
So. One at a time.
The waiting.
Down it goes.
The programme you did not follow and could not tell anybody a thing about.
Down it goes.
The one who said they would ring on Sunday.
Down it goes.
And the account you have been keeping of today, the one that calls it another nothing.
Down it goes.
Some things are not for the floor.
If there is something that has to be said out loud to a person — the call you have been going to make, the thing somebody in this family has never been told — that one does not go down tonight. That one gets said, to them, this week.
Now look at the floor.
Four things, on a day you would have told anybody was empty. The waiting alone is tiring, and nobody has ever counted it as anything.
And it is the same floor, over a longer stretch, for the rest of it. Nobody is ever shown the size of what they have been under, because you cannot look at a thing and carry it at the same moment. Not the good of it and not the bad of it.
This chapter is not telling you what any of it means about you. It says one thing. There was a great deal of it.
The last thing down is the one who has been putting things down.
The chair is holding you. It was built to and it is doing it now, and it does not require you to be satisfied with your life first. Tonight does not need the life to have come out differently before you can sit in it.
So you can stop holding yourself up. Not the responsibility — that is not what goes down here.
Just the holding.