level after level

 

"How are you?"

social interactions can be clumsy,

like we are pilots in rough seas

full of menacing shoals,

so we fall back on the tried

but not necessarily true,

we go forward with 'how are you?"

not really expecting an answer to the question,

except in some nebulous response

that re-establishes our connection,

in the last five years I have often paused

and tried to figure out what level of response to give,

during Covid's predation, I wondered about my response to contagion,

during Trump's disastrous reign, I have wondered how much

to comment on the social dissolution

American's grand mistakes is causing,

does the good-hearted questioner

want just to know of our health?

of our personal realities?

or just to roughly say they care about us

and only have a clumsy common question to show it?

I particularly get frustrated when asked about retirement,

for that for me is still a "work in progress"

to transition from worth and value coming from work and doing,

to letting go of being driven

and enjoying the subtler gifts of being,

having earned a vacation can I just enjoy it?

I wondered today if I might experiment with lying:

telling the questioner I'm giving myself to golf, to volunteering,

those answers which many people give,

the real answers to how I am and how I'm doing

require a leap of trust and faith between us

that I hope I am ready for

but I wonder if they are,

on a deep level I think all of us are faking it,

doing our best to be, to do,

with what is right for us, now,

at best we can navigate in troubled waters

when we don't know either our destination

or the length of this final trip.

by Henry H. Walker

July 6, ‘26