No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us.

Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.

Music: “Sun Will Set” by Zoë Keating, with the artist’s permission; image: my father walking through the sunflower fields of Bulgaria, under an image by the Vera Rubin Observatory.

RUTA
Mario Benedetti

La encontré en mi bolsillo / era una ruta
no sabía hasta dónde me llevaba
pero igual la seguí en un merodeo
con todas mis nostalgias en la mano

era un atlas del alma / la conciencia
de lo que cometí y lo que me espera
en el suelo vi huellas que eran propias
así que era una senda ya corrida

el piélago de antes ya no estaba
todo era más fuerte más seguro
de pronto me encontré con la ribera
de ese río que siempre fue mi anhelo

sólo entonces me aconsejé a mí mismo
en el bolsillo volví a poner la ruta
y allí quedó esperando
otro mañana

ROADMAP
by Mario Benedetti
     translated by Maria Popova

I found it in my pocket / it was a roadmap
I knew not where it led
but I followed it anyway in aimless wanderlust
with all my nostalgias in hand

it was an atlas of the soul / of consciousness
of what I have committed and what awaits me
on the ground I saw footprints that were my own
and so it was a path already trodden

the vastness of before had vanished
everything was stronger, surer
suddenly I landed on the riverbank
the river that had always been my longing

only then did I heed my own advice
I tucked the path into my pocket once more
and there it remained, awaiting
another tomorrow

Couple with Benedetti’s clarion call to stop waiting and start living, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longings.