I want to say something profound about thresholds, about how we're suspended between departure and arrival. But what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door. This is the gap between how we think we experience the world and how we actually do.

Perhaps what I'm describing is simply the movement from romanticism to realism, from the aesthetics of intensity to the ethics of attention. Perhaps it is only that I have loved and been loved enough times to know that the experience bears little resemblance to its representations.

After thirty years, I've learned journaling isn't about capturing life but about the practice of presence itself—and I'm returning to share that uncertainty.