![]() ![]() Although it's unfortunate, sometimes success comes at this price. If you never experience failure, you never learn how to succeed. However, the point the singer is trying to express is that even though the outcome of these relationships wasn't successful, that doesn't mean the time was wasted, as hard as it may be for the girl to accept in her current emotional state. The girl in the song has experienced many such failures, and has become disheartened by them - she's wasted so much time on relationships that she feels weren't worth the investment since they failed her, and she's weary at the prospect of wasting any more. You devoted time getting to know someone and sharing yourself with them, and it seems that it's all for naught, because that person no longer desires your company in that capacity. Let that be our measure of GDP and if you take a few minutes to read or write some poetry today, look at it as the most productive thing you did all day.When we're in relationships that fail, and the grief of that failure is still fresh, it's easy to view the time you spent with that person as "wasted", because the relationship ended. If you could waste your life more brilliantly, what would you do? What unremarkable thing do you still aspire to achieve? Where do you need to hang your hammock and let the clouds and bronze butterflies float by? During this time of working from home, ask yourself this question? How hard should you really be working right now? Is your 70% good enough at a time when productivity and all measures of it by an economist are not going to improve our national economy and GDP, unless we define GDP as Good Devoted People. Reading Wright always feels to me like I am so grateful they hadn’t invented medications for depression yet, because a placated, medicated Wright would have been a boring writer I fear. Wright’s poetry fit the era in which it came forth: a celebration of fly over land, the unremarkable Midwest and a reconciliation of the beginning of when working class, middle class unexceptional white men began fading into obscurity, or so it has felt, maybe they were always in obscurity and Wright’s poetry was finally just stating the obvious. He wrote more than one masterful sonnet, but metrical structured poetry was not his best legacy. ![]() ![]() My greatest ambition the next 30 years is to do less more often and do it in peace. For me its strive to still write a few more good poems, nourish my irresponsible self and be the person sitting in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm and do absolutely nothing but think, read and look at the beauty around me. ![]() It feels like I am at a juncture where I can see the past and the future and the question is what is yet to be done? It certainly isn’t climb the corporate ladder or build a bigger house or buy typical retirement toys, in other words do the things many people aspire to do as a measure of success at this stage in their lives. My surviving parent is likely older than the age I will be when I die. My children are the ages that I was when I had them. When I read the last line of Wright’s poem, what I think he is saying to me is, “I wasted my life” not by doing nothing or not doing more, but by not doing nothing more often! On a week that saw me turn a rather harmless late 50’s birthday, I have had that thought more than once in the past month, “I have wasted my life.” Hasn’t every late 50’s something man and woman thought that at least once? However, maybe not in the way you might think. One of the things I appreciate about James Wright, is the slight fog which permeates even his most sunny days. Join 457 other subscribers Search for: Archives ![]()
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