You can hold the truth of a thing

in both hands,

turn it over,

see it clearly

in whatever light is available —

and still wake up the next morning the same distance from peace as the day before.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe mind arrives first. The rest of you takes the slow road.

We have built a kind of mythology around the moment of decision. As though the turning point is the turn. As though saying I accept this to yourself in a quiet room is the same as the walls of the room actually changing. It isn't. The decision is just the name you give to your intention. What follows is something longer and less dramatic and mostly invisible — a thousand small moments where the old feeling rises anyway, and you let it, and it passes, and you are neither healed nor broken by its passing.

Grief doesn't respond to reason. Even grief over small losses, private losses, the losses that have no funerals. You can construct the most airtight case for why something no longer deserves your suffering and the suffering will sit there, vaguely bored by your argument, unmoved by your eloquence. It has its own schedule.

What actually happens, when it does happen, is quieter than a decision. It's more like a slow forgetting that isn't quite forgetting. The thing is still there. You just stop organizing your days around the fact of it. You stop bracing before you remember. The memory comes and finds you already upright, already moving, and it passes through rather than stopping you entirely.

It asks for something closer to indifference than effort — a willingness to stop measuring the distance between where you are and where you think you should be. The harder you make it an act of will, the further it tends to recede. Like sleep, it comes when you stop listening for it.

At some point the thing that happened to you just becomes part of what is true. Not good, not fine, not resolved — just true. And you are still here, and mostly intact, and moving through the world with the particular knowledge of someone who has had to negotiate with something they didn't choose.

That is not nothing. It is, in fact, almost everything.

Thanks for reading The Eccentric Vox! This post is public so feel free to share it.