The Directions

He was the sort of person who writes directions to himself.  The sort of person who writes everything down.  It was some kind of worship, or else some kind of disease.  Besides each direction, he wrote the letter D, and drew a square around it.  Like many directionless persons, he was obsessed with the idea of directions, that such a thing might exist.

D  Practice being silent, open and available.

D  You may wish to be happy.  But for the practice of kindness it is best to remain sad. 

D  Experiment with NOT following that impulse.  For once.  Seriously. 

Needless to say, if he had a dollar for every D with a square around it, he’d have drastically more money than he’d made in his unprofitable and not particularly short life.

He had a favorite writer, whom he considered his role model.  Not surprisingly, this gentleman had spent twenty-six years in the madhouse, where he was reported to be “perfectly lucid and ready to converse on a wide variety of literary and political topics.”  He’d been found dead in a snow bank on Christmas Day. 

Every word his favorite writer had written seemed to apply directly to him.  Most especially when he wrote: His effect on the world was potentially astonishing.