This is Episode 63 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "The Way It Is" by William Stafford.

Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of Apple Computers, once said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Today’s poem by William Stafford, an American poet who died in 1993 at the age of 79, reminded me of that. Stafford once said, “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” This poem, The Way It Is, is another way of looking at those dots or that hidden river. Maybe the two main tasks in our life are as simply put as they are difficult to accomplish: first to find our thread, and then to commit to following it wherever it leads.

You can read the poem here.

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Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com