Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You

People occasionally ask if Vanished Roads is autobiographical. The answer is yes, but probably not in the way they mean. There isn't a poem in the book that says, "Here is exactly what happened." If that's what you're looking for, you won't find it. Haiku isn't particularly interested in autobiography. It notices a moment, then another, and leaves the reader to discover the road between them. Looking back, I suppose that's exactly how healing happened too.

Around the time the pandemic arrived, my own life became unexpectedly small. Not because of lockdowns. That was happening to everyone. Mine had already begun shrinking. Relationships ended. The future I thought I was walking toward simply wasn't there anymore. There were health concerns, disappointments, and losses that no longer seem especially important to recount in detail. Some stories become less interesting with time. What remains interesting is what they made possible.

For a while I honestly believed my best work was behind me. That wasn't self-pity so much as simple arithmetic. You add enough disappointments together and eventually you stop expecting the next morning to be much different from the last one. I wasn't looking for inspiration. I was simply trying to make it through another ordinary day without giving too much thought to what had disappeared.

The surprising thing is that life rarely changes all at once. It changes because one afternoon you decide to go for a walk instead of staying inside. It changes because someone places a book in your hands. It changes because you notice a bird you've passed a hundred times before and, for reasons you can't explain, this time you actually stop to watch it. Those tiny moments don't feel important while they're happening, but they have a habit of accumulating.

Somewhere during those years I found Zen, or perhaps Zen found me. I don't mean enlightenment or serenity. I mean something much simpler. I slowly stopped arguing with reality. I stopped measuring every new day against the one that had been taken from me. Zen never returned what I had lost, but it gradually convinced me that my happiness no longer depended on getting it back. That turned out to be a tremendous freedom.