I have a terse poem published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Soliloquist Journal. A paperback version is also for sale with a 15-percent discount code: RE5RQ6G15.
“The Point of Regret” appears in my unpublished philosophical poetry collection entitled Embrace the Futility. It’s similar in theme to another short poem, “Resolution of Existence,” which appears in my 2021 book Outward Arrangements: Poems.
Resolution of Existence
You must
Live the life
You have
And not
The one
You want.
This essay was published in the Spring 2024 issue of The Awakenings Review. I’m grateful to editor Robert Lundin for giving me permission to publish the essay on my blog.
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In the pediatric surgery waiting room, my wife, Pam, and I sit on a couch, watching a television screen as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House subcommittee about the data-sharing scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. It’s April 2018, and we’ve been here all morning since bringing our two-year-old son, Colin, to the hospital for an anesthesia-induced auditory brainstem response (ABR) test.
The audiologist steps into the room and shuffles toward us with his eyes cast downward. He’s short and balding with grayish-brown hair on the sides of his head. After he directs us to a more private area, he says in a low voice, “He’s doing fine. The test went well. It’s good news from my perspective, but maybe bad news for you. His hearing is fine, perfectly normal.”
“So what does that mean?” I say.
“It means his hearing isn’t the cause of his delayed speech.”
“I knew it. I knew it,” Pam says.
We would receive the official diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) a few months later. And as Colin has grown, during moments when he refuses to eat, take a bath, or leave the house, or when he throws tantrums—his face bright red, his arms flapping, and his voice emitting high-pitched screams that reverberate off the walls and ceiling—I have repeated two mantras in my head: “Embrace the Futility” and its softer sibling, “Accept the Inevitable.”
Colin’s room. He loves to line up his toys in patterns,
I use these twin sayings as coping mechanisms to brook the vagaries and hardships of life.
I take no credit for inventing the verbiage of Embrace the Futility. One of my co-workers at a broadcast news wire service in Arizona shouted the phrase several years ago when we were understaffed on the overnight shift and getting inundated with news summaries and audio files sent to us from multiple markets across the country.
Embrace the Futility sounds like a negative concept, but it is a positive and freeing principle (at least for me).
It guides my behavior with one central dictum: I am not in control. The world is a dealer at a Las Vegas blackjack table, and the house always wins. My mental approach is, “Expect the worst and be pleased when it doesn’t turn out that way.”
At an early age, our parents teach us that we will live for a short time and then die. The rules of the game are rigged. We know the score at the outset, and the contest ends in our defeat.
Embrace the Futility and Accept the Inevitable give me the freedom to let go of things I am powerless to control. As a result, I reconcile myself to an existence dictated by failure, sickness, and eventual death.
This is a personal philosophy based on my lived experience; it may not work for everyone. But Embrace the Futility and Accept the Inevitable have helped me to endure the inexorable rough patches in life.
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I am consumed with pity for my son, knowing his autism—his diminished ability to communicate verbally—puts him out of alignment with the rest of the world. In this case, love proves impotent to effect change or prevent the hurt he will absorb as he grows.
Colin sitting in the stands on the first-base line.
I understand I am professing ableism. I recognize Colin’s disability should not be viewed as a problem that needs to be fixed. But as a parent, I know his autism dictates his future, making his life more difficult. Colin may never lead an independent life. He may never enjoy what neurotypical kids experience—playing organized sports, going to college, falling in love, and working full-time.
I can’t wish away his autism or intervene to make him “normal.”
I could lament the diagnosis. I could resist—to metaphorically bang my head against a cinder block wall and expect to make an opening. Instead, I acknowledge that I cannot “cure” Colin, and I accept him unconditionally. And amid the many challenges of raising an autistic child, Pam and I savor ordinary moments with Colin, relishing his squeals of laughter and his blithesome presence as he jumps around our living room.
Pam and Colin.
But Embrace the Futility and Accept the Inevitable have universal applications. Your car breaks down. You file for divorce. Bankruptcy, fraud, cancer, a broken femur, or a flooded basement—sure, bring it on.
Embrace the Futility and Accept the Inevitable can help anyone reframe the unavoidable “suckiness” of life. You don’t ignore the mess, but you admit you can’t control it. And it’s OK to let go—to reconcile yourself to what the universe throws at you.
Since age fifteen, I’ve had multiple surgeries and radiation treatments for a slow-growth, benign tumor at the base of the brain, near the pituitary gland. The latest surgical intervention came in July 2023, when a neurosurgeon and an ears, nose, and throat specialist teamed up, taking a transsphenoidal approach (through the nose) to extract tumor remnants that had affected my vision. Even as I write these words, I know the craniopharyngioma will eventually expand in my head and another date on the operating table looms in my future.
I was also diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2017. The disease has altered my digestion and lung function while leaving me with bent, aching fingers.
And while I do my share of complaining about these medical conditions, I also Embrace the Futility of my body breaking down, since the decline is inescapable.
My late father, Francis Sr., offered the best example of Accepting the Inevitable.
When he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2007, an oncologist gave him the option of starting chemotherapy, but the doctor stressed the dismal odds of the treatment elongating my father’s life. My dad curled his bottom lip and said, “Why bother? What’s the point?”
Dad, side angle. Photo by Francis DiClemente.
He rejected tubes, injections, and trips to the hospital. He endured his fate with stoicism, making the best of his last six months on earth, placing bets at OTB (Off-Track Betting), racking up credit card debt (which would be wiped out with his death), and eating sweets he had eschewed previously—Klondike bars and Little Debbie snacks—before dying at home under hospice care.
So now, when circumstances beyond my control arise, I follow my father’s model. I submit, acquiesce, and capitulate—assenting myself to a fate I cannot sway. And this allows me to move forward without resistance to the vicissitudes of life.
I recently watched About Endlessness, a 2019 film by Swedish director Roy Andersson. It falls in line with other works by Andersson, including You, the Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014).
The film is a series of vignettes that explore the absurdity, tragedy, and loneliness of life. They are comical and fantastical, mundane and realistic, all at the same time. Andersson probes existential themes, and although About Endlessness is a Swedish film with subtitles, it transcends country and language based its universal portrayal of humanity and the raw emotions expressed.
Andersson’s style consists of static scenes composed of single long takes with all action taking place within the frame—like a painting come to life. Andersson’s work exemplifies film critic André Bazin’s theory of mise-en-scène—with composition, lighting, set design, and production design being more important than editing.
And the wide-angle shots by cinematographer Gergely Pálos reminded me of the deep focus cinematography of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane.
A subdued female narrator describes banal moments, like a woman with a stroller in a train station who loses one of the heels on her black shoes. “I saw a woman who had problems with her shoe,” the narrator explains.
This type of plotless film is not for everyone; it’s aimed for an art house audience. However, Andersson has a good sense of timing. Just when the viewer’s interest in a scene starts to wane, he cuts to something else. And with a running time of 78 minutes, the film does not drag.
A couple of vignettes really stood out for me.
In a crowded market, with fresh fish in the foreground and produce and cheese in the background, a woman with dark hair and a brown coat converses with a man. She then walks away, moving toward the fish station and eventually toward the center of the frame.
A bald man shouts to her: “I could see the two of you had a lot to talk about.” He then slaps her across the face. The other customers look on but do not intervene. He slaps her two more times and then some men step in and stop him. The bald man is wrestled to the ground, and he says to the woman: “You do know that I love you?” And she responds, “Yes, dear, I know. I know.”
Still from About Endlessness.
This realistic portrayal of spousal violence filled me with unease. Yet I couldn’t look away. Putting myself in the middle of that market, I ask myself, “How would I have reacted? Would I have tried to stop the man from hitting his wife? How many slaps would he have connected on before I came to her defense?”
In the second scene I want to point out, Andersson depicts an urban bar/cafe during the evening hours with light snow falling outside the windows. Silent Night plays in the background, and we are unsure if the music is playing inside the bar or if Andersson is using the track as a music bed.
A dentist from an earlier scene has come in to get a drink, and he looks down at the countertop as he holds a glass. He appears melancholy, and the scene conjures an image of Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks.
Still from About Endlessness.
A short male customer turns to the dentist and says, “Isn’t it quite fantastic?” When the dentist does not respond, the man turns to another customer and repeats his line verbatim. This time, a thin customer in a black suit says, “What?” And the man who asked the original question responds: “Everything. Everything. Everything is fantastic.” And the man in the suit says, “Well, yes.” And the little man adds, “I think so, at least.”
I believe Andersson elevates the art form of cinema through his portrayal of humanity, his mix of humor and pathos, and his willingness to let the viewer fill in the details or complete the narratives he has set in motion.
To find out more about Andersson check out his Wikipedia page or his IMDb page.
Francis DiClemente 