unpreparedness

You spend your life preparing, rehearsing, putting on masks for this and that, but are never prepared for what really matters.

For being alive.

And how could it be otherwise? Because being alive is being alert and responsive to those unscripted moments, those empty spaces that can change everything and in relation to which all preparations are in vain.

How difficult to face our general unpreparedness, though; how much easier to run away and take refuge in the predictable.


How much easier to be untruthful, disloyal to ourselves.

*       *       *

Coming into the world
unprepared


and being then always --
in honour of that
birth and to stay
close to it --
under-provided


and driven to exhibit
over and over again
unpreparedness


habitually
unready to be caught
born


--Roy Fisher, 'A Poem to be Watched' in The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996), p. 144.