"varieties of dignity, withholding, tact"
May you hold something back today so it can grow in strength.
Repression
by C.K. Williams
More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace,
of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable capitulation.
C.K. Williams from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Creative Invitation
Practice holding your tongue between your teeth when someone else is speaking, to slow down your rate of response. See what exists in between the impulses.