Glimpses. We get glimpses.

We think we know where we’re headed, but we don’t. From the darkness of our mother’s wombs we ride the chute into hospital florescence, then into the fickle daylight, then into lives that carry us like tubes on a bendy river as we crane our necks for a better look and snap our quivering butts from the water to avoid each pointed rock. We try to see what’s coming but we can’t. Not really. All we can do is steer as best we can, flap our hands and feet a bit, will the river to calm as we approach it, then hoot as it whorls in sudden fury and slaps and sprays our eyes. We yield to forward motion. We laugh with our nearest loved ones. We inhale, then exhale, then wonder what the hell will hit us next. And we go on.

Or maybe we hike through dense woods to an unseen summit, moving our legs on faith. We know something’s up there. We know nothing’s up there: just a view, just a chance to stop for a moment and glance outward at creation. We hike upwards for miles in the hopes of being still, of grasping beauty, of sensing a sublime destination even if it’s out of reach. That it exists at all is enough to keep us going as we hike back down to nurse our blisters and tool around blind through our madhouse lives, wanting to feel there’s a purpose.

Or maybe we make music on a porch at night with friends and cousins, people we haven’t seen for years or decades or ever, maybe, but people who become — in that protracted, joyous instant — proof that life isn’t done with any of us, that life has direction, that life is filled with healing reunion even as memories of the absent make us weep. All we can know is what came before us and where we stand now. Stories illuminate the past. Love lights the present. We root ourselves in the here and now as best we can, batting away fears of death and age and loneliness and decrepitude and all the other gnats that cloud our psyches.

We can’t see much. Not ahead of us. Not in that direction. All we can know is the gifts that stand before us, the music we feel in our bones, the breeze that caresses a northern lake and the breath that shapes each moment. That’s all, and that’s enough. Now.