The Way Undesired

"All I ask is a quiet life together."

~ Gong Li as Jiazhen, the wife of a recovered gambling addict, in the 1994 film, “To Live”, by Zhang Yimou

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Dear Alex,

The voice of the narrator in your posted video yesterday, I was sure, must have come from a young man, light and crisp as morning to bare wisdom of the coming hours. When several seconds followed and the camera turned to a figure hunched and hesitant up the stairs, I realized what I had not sought: “Weakness is the way,” says J. I. Packer.

Have you heard of these four words in any mainstream media or family prayers? The way, not any or one, is most discriminating and obstinate, unmarketable to modern expansive minds. The way of the aging and limping exhausts our imagination. We invent ways to cancel weakness or de-label it to flaunt its transformative venture as a unicorn.

I want to write more but it is past midnight now and work is to start by dawn. You may suggest I take my time to post on another day perhaps more sensible to the hand and hour granted. Do you even understand your own text? Is this your final draft?

I am a weak writer, I know. A weaker reader and thinker. I thank you for bearing with me on this road for the tenuous. If indeed weakness is the way, I better keep fumbling on my keyboard screen, knees flushed in incandescent light, my wish for ease torn asunder by the delusion spewed from the actress Gong Li in the movie adaptation of Yu Hua’s novel 活着 [To Live].

Yours,
Kate