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# It Might Have Been Otherwise
- URL: https://letters.michaelmaddaus.com/blog/it-might-have-been-otherwise/
- Published: 2025-08-31T12:01:52.000Z
- Updated: 2025-08-31T12:01:52.000Z
- Author: Michael Maddaus
- Tags: Newsletter

A lovely post about life and the poet Jane Kenyon arrived in my inbox today from the brilliant [Maria Popova](https://www.themarginalian.org/about/?ref=letters.michaelmaddaus.com) and her newsletter [The Marginalian](https://www.themarginalian.org/?ref=letters.michaelmaddaus.com), and I had to share it with you.

Maria writes:

*"The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life.*

*This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it go.*

*Shortly before leukemia claimed her life at only forty-seven, Kenyon captured the miraculousness of the light having passed through us *at all* — which contours the luckiness of death — in a haunting poem that puts any complaint, any lament, any argument with life into perspective:"*

**OTHERWISE**  
*by Jane Kenyon*

I got out of bed  
on two strong legs.  
It might have been  
otherwise. I ate  
cereal, sweet  
milk, ripe, flawless  
peach. It might  
have been otherwise.  
I took the dog uphill  
to the birch wood.  
All morning I did  
the work I love.  
At noon I lay down  
with my mate. It might  
have been otherwise.  
We ate dinner together  
at a table with silver  
candlesticks. It might  
have been otherwise.  
I slept in a bed  
in a room with paintings  
on the walls, and  
planned another day  
just like this day.  
But one day, I know,  
it will be otherwise.