February 7
How small is the portion of boundless, unfathomable time allotted to each of us — in an instant it vanishes into eternity. How small the portion of all matter, how small the corner of the earth on which you crawl.
Meditations XII,32
Listening mode
How small is the portion of boundless, unfathomable time allotted to each of us — in an instant it vanishes into eternity. How small the portion of all matter, how small the corner of the earth on which you crawl.
When a mistake keeps you awake at night, it can help to think in orders of magnitude. A sentence that came out wrong, measured against centuries and continents, shrinks. Shame can then no longer so easily claim the whole night for itself.
But if someone tells you about their own sleepless night, you would hardly hand them this calculation. It would not be wrong; it would simply come from the wrong direction. What relieves you can easily sound, to someone else, like being waved away.
Perhaps the wide view only works reliably when turned inward. Applied to yourself, it strips the hurt of its outsized proportions. Applied to others, it takes from them something that belongs to them: that their sorrow, in their night, may be just as large as it is.
The two cannot be separated quite so neatly, though. You too are sometimes in no mood for centuries. Then it is good to have someone sitting beside you who makes nothing smaller. They only ask what exactly you said, and listen to the end.
