Wistful by Jamie Kirkpatrick

A dear friend and loyal reader recently told me that my last two Musings seemed, in his words, “wistful.” I don’t think he was wrong. I do yearn for simpler times: the carefree days of childhood, the strength and fearlessness of youth, even the occasional satisfactions of maturity. But old age is different. I’ve come to realize that my time here is growing short and if there are stories left to tell, I’d better begin telling them now. 

Perhaps that’s why I devoted myself seriously to writing ten-plus years ago. Since my first Musing appeared here in February 2016, I’ve produced two complications of essays, a children’s book, and four novels. (The fourth one comes out in a few weeks—I know, shameless self-promotion.) I’m proud of my work, but at the same time, I wonder, “Is it enough? Is there more?”

The rumor is that writing is difficult. There’s probably some fire to that smoke, but the task of writing is essentially putting letters together to form words, assembling words into sentences, building paragraphs out of those sentences, then sewing all the paragraphs together to tell a seamless story. That last one, friends, is where writing does get hard because the real toil of writing is deciding which stories to tell and just how to tell them. I could, for example, tell you about the time I fell off the jungle gym in kindergarten, or the time I launched myself out of an airplane, or the follies and insecurities of my adolescence, or the year when everything fell apart and I found myself lost and alone. You can probably guess which one of those stories would be hardest to tell.

All in all, looking back is good exercise. Happy memories remain happy. The sad times are still hard to swallow, but (if we’re lucky) we learn from our mistakes. But as the assembled letters in the word suggest, “wistful” implies a longing that goes beyond a happy memory or a lesson learned. “Wistful” implies a pensive sadness with a whiff of melancholy or nostalgia, recalling an “if only” moment when what might have been turned into what actually was.

Poets drink from wistful cups. Carl Sandberg remembered kisses on his lips. A.E. Housman remembered a childhood he could never return to. William Butler Yeats yearned for a love he took for granted. But as you know by now, my favorite poet is Robert Frost and he, too, had his wistful moments—his road not taken, or these lines from “Birches:”

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood…

So, back to my friend and his insight into the feeling that has indeed infused my writing these last several weeks: yes; I am feeling wistful, and if these last few Musings mirror that emotion, I plead guilty. But here’s the thing: once you name a feeling, you claim that feeling, and in that claiming, you can begin to tell the next story you need to tell. Because there’s always another story to tell.

I’ll be right back.