Today I was inspired by a couple of things I’m reading. The first is Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, edited by Patrick Henry. A colleague of mine, Richard Middleton-Kaplan, wrote a powerful chapter about the myth of passivity, and in it one survivor describes herself as feeling like she was “under orders to live.” There were other phrases that caught my eye, like “loose talk.” But mostly I got stuck on the idea of being under orders to live; I thought about how it sounds almost resentful, as though she would otherwise take a different route. Sometimes I realize how my family has placed me under orders to live, how I am obligated to take care of my life because of my love for them. And that brought me to another equally powerful read, Stay by Jennifer Michael Hecht, one of my favorite writers. It’s all about the argument against suicide. Sometimes life is a task, an order, a form of resistance in itself. So today’s poem, “As Far As I Go,” may seem bleak, but I prefer to see it as a testament to how we keep each other anchored.