July 28
Time is a river of events, a torrential one: no sooner has something come into view than it has already been carried past — and something else is carried in, and that too is swept away.
Meditations IV,43
Listening mode
Time is a river of events, a torrential one: no sooner has something come into view than it has already been carried past — and something else is carried in, and that too is swept away.
Some things you understand only once they no longer ask anything of you. In a week with a move, an illness in the family and a deadline at work, there is hardly room to think about any of it. You deal with the next thing, and the last one has vanished before you could say how it was for you.
That can feel like a failing. You have lived through a great deal, but hardly any of it have you really noticed.
At the same time, the rush takes something off your hands. A clumsy remark or a slight you would otherwise have brooded over for days is pushed aside by the next thing before it can settle in. The same movement that denies you any lingering also spares you some lingering you would never have wanted.
Which of the two is happening, you can hardly tell in a week like that. Only later, on a quiet evening, does something resurface. Not necessarily the most important thing. Sometimes just a look on someone's face in the stairwell, between two boxes, that you didn't think you had even noticed at the time.
