The day progresses. You write a little. Go for a walk that becomes a run. Go to the grocery store. Write a little more. Somewhere in there you feel yourself gathering calm and concentration. You realize the key catalyst involved the absence of a computer. (Is that a catalyst? A catalyst would work the other way. The computer catalyzes the anxiety.)

Without the computer, outside, elsewhere, your brain unclenches, stops that tense shivering frenzy. Somewhere in the baked goods section you find yourself able to see a cake, appreciated the cake, not even want to eat the cake, just enjoy the general cakeness of the cake and the pretty icing colors and the momentary enjoyment of cake. How silly to enjoy the existence of cake! How wonderful to feel silly! How alive to feel silly!

So, you try again. “Under Pressure” on the sound system. You open yourself to the groove, knowing that it might open you to emotions that make you cry, but you open yourself to that. You feel the beat, “coming down on you…lovelovelovelove….” How silly to be jamming in the middle of the grocery story next to the Instapots, waiting for the Eminent Historian to return with Teriyaki sauce! How alive to feel silly!

This moment. This moment. This moment.

Earlier that morning you had patrolled the yard. The sun not entirely above the treeline left much of the back, by the thicket, in shadow. No socks, tenny shoes, spooky-story podcast still in your mind, dark undergrowth, made good companions for a mood that asked “why are you alive?” You stepped on a soft spot, a divot of deeper grass, and felt your death.

What does that mean? You aren’t sure exactly, but those words came to you, or the sense of those words. A sense of a grave and being on its edge. A sense of dark, damp earthiness. You weren’t sure how you felt about it, but you weren’t quite ready for it, yet. You just don’t want to feel this way. That much you are sure you know.

This moment. This moment. This other silly moment that made you feel this side of that death.

You again wonder what hope is. When you were younger, you rejected the concept of hope as a fool’s errand, a thing that people clung to in the absence of action, in helplessness. You felt that you had to reject it to force yourself to act. “Fuck hope!” you told yourself, “hope is dreaming. Do something.” So, you did. Hope remained dreaming in your cosmological dictionary.

You listen to a podcast, With Friends Like These, hosted by Ana Marie Cox, a recovering alcoholic herself. She talks about hope as an action. You began listening to her in the past two or three years — since the last election. (Time moves strangely for you, the older you get.) For some reason, hope seemed necessary since then. Maybe not “hope,” but something like it. Something that keeps you on this side of the grave. Something that keeps you moving in something resembling a forward motion (and maybe the fatal flaw is the idea of “forward motion”). The idea of hope as an action fit with your “fuck hope” ideology.

She interviewed author Eva Hagberg this week who told of a friend who, on her deathbed, still had hope. “How?” Hagberg wanted to know. “Hope is the now,” the dying friend said. Well, that’s a twist.

Then, again, maybe not.

This moment. This moment. This silly moment. This keeps you on this side of the grave. This is also what kept you sober for a year and change. This is what kept you wanting to be on this side of the grave and wanting to be sober for a year and change (ok, wanting for most of that year, the last few months have had their challenges). This action of inaction, of concentration, of calm, like in meditation or the right kind of yoga in which you have to pay attention to unclench. You have to pay attention to now.

This summer of fury, frustration, worry, more fury, all of the worst parts of your work, all of the things you feel that you have earned that now feel snatched or devalued, the binaries and meanness (even from people preaching – no, demanding! — empathy), felt like a room getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Why were you alive?

You still ask that. Why are you still alive? The hope, the thing that keeps you on this side of the grave is the moment.

But, here is the conundrum: you cannot think about the future at all or the moment collapses. The future can be as soon as finishing this post, as soon as this afternoon. The future can be next week, or next month. You really have a hard time thinking that anything after the election exists. Next year does not exist in any form in your head, and when the Eminent Historian in his optimism says something like, “maybe we can go to Greece,” or “maybe we can finally do those research trips,” you find that thought far more depressing than what will more likely happen and what will more likely happen makes you ask why you would still be alive. (Except not to be alive would hurt him beyond reason, and you also do want to be with him and never hurt him that way.)

Yet, you HAVE to think about some future. You have to grade. You have to finish this paper for this Zoom conference on Thursday and Friday. You have to grade. You have to prepare for class. You have to grade. You have to write this review. You have to grade. You have to write this peer review. You have to grade. You have to answer these e-mails. You have to grade. You have to grade. You have to grade and grade and grade because online teaching is all about the grading and very little about helping students understand the subject. All of these put you in front of the computer, all of these make you feel dread, and all of these force you think of the future. The future heightens the sense of futility and pointlessness of all of it, which steals the moment and any concept of hope.

That. That is the conundrum. You don’t know why you feel this way, what about you, with no children, no dependents, no nothing to add to this, drives you into deeper despair than anyone else you know. You don’t know how not to be this way because every time you try not to be this way and think you have succeeded, you find the conundrum and end up right back in despair and feeling a failure as a human being. Yet, here you are. Looking for the moment.