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" I was struck by how everyone I encountered spent their days working feverishly to make enough money to buy a better tomorrow. Here, people are content - they buy what they need to day and leave tomorrow to God. These people dont have a death grip on their life here. They hold it loosely because they're not in control of it in the first place, and... in their experience, it can be ripped from their hands no matter how tightly they squeeze it".
Somewhere in there, I clued in to the fact that for people like me, there us an undoing that occurs here. A breaking. Like dropping a glass rod. It is the sound of the shattering of our assumptions when we learn that our pretending, our masquerading, is all vanity. As if we have any control over any of this. I, like most everyone I've known, spent most of my life furiously attempting to protect myself from the truth, from the undignified bottle beneath the hammock. Truth is, we can't protect us. These people don't suffer from the illusions that I have built up to insulate myself-namely that death wont come for me on a hammock in Nicaragua when I don't have the strength to stand so I pee in my pants. That somehow I deserve different. "
― Charles Martin , Water from My Heart
