Still Growing

In younger years, people were always starting things.
We started jobs in borrowed suits,
projects with foam boards and bright markers,
planted basil in windowsills,
thinking it would last forever.

Now I am setting things down,
not out of weariness,
but as you might let go of a kite string—
watching it rise,
not fall.

We have an old apartment near the sea.
It’s solid, a little worn,
like a favourite sentence
underlined too many times.
I imagine morning walks,
the sand learning my steps again.

I’ve made a list:
write daily,
feed my mind two chapters at a time,
volunteer where stories are brittle
and want to be held.
Study one great thinker each year—
not to master them,
but to keep company with their ghosts.

I think about bushland,
and what it might mean to help something grow
by pulling away what shouldn’t be there.
To join others who believe
the earth deserves better than our forgetfulness.

Not everything will happen.
But bees don’t need to do everything.
They dance their directions,
they return,
they build
in small hexagons of precision and sweetness,
never quite knowing
how much the world depends on them.

Daily writing prompt

How do you want to retire?

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