Opportunities

I'm feeling nostalgic and sad tonight about some past opportunities that I chose not to take. Maybe it was foolish to choose that way, and maybe I was doing the best I could at the time, conserving precious energy, or triaging the feelings of those I loved. Maybe it went both ways. But I'm sad thinking about the things I didn't experience -- dance lessons from a gift certificate given by an ex-boyfriend, a few more days in England last spring, half a dozen smaller thing.

This, therefore, is a reminder to myself to think harder about taking opportunities in the future. I still won't take every one. I'm human, and I do need to keep my sanity in order to go on finding more opportunities. But I want to be, again, as I sometimes have been, a person who jumps at chances.

I want to suck the juice out of life and savor its sweetness, like Keats with his nectarine:

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine -- good God how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry."

(quoted by Anne Fadiman in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, p. 97)