Living on Writer's Block

Sometimes you don’t have to move.

Sometimes you need to not move.

Sometimes you can just sit.

Be.

Stay.

See. 

Live.

Exist.

Experience.

Do you watch the sunset? Or the sunrise? You’re watching that moment come and go, a moment Someone set in place and carved into proverbial stone long before you existed. 

And that moment has ancestors and descendants you will never see, or even dream about, that are finite and have come and gone many times through Someone’s mind, as they come and go now. The end is coming. Eon by eon, century by century, decade by decade, year by year month by month weekbyweek daybyday hourbyhourminutebyminutesecondbysecondmomentbymoment and we gasp for breath, pleading with time to slow down, to give us more of itself, to stop.

But we can’t stop it. It can’t stop it. We can’t do anything about it. 

We live here. We live here, in this moment right now, and we are watching grains of sand in our hourglass trickle through that little bottle neck. 

And still —

“But it’s just one grain,” we say. “It’s just five minutes.”

Will you regret that choice five years in the future? Five weeks? Five minutes or EVEN — five seconds?

Sand trickles one grain at a time; but those grains add up to a flood and soon that top bulb of glass is empty. This time, there will be no flipping it over.

The world moves quickly.

And so, we spend our time in the office. In the kitchen. Busy. Working. Doing. Go-go-going. Hurrying, rushing, speeding. This is the way we were raised, the way we learned life has to go, the way we are required to move every day just to get the most basic things done. Everyone’s on a schedule.

The world moves quickly.

But in saying that, I commit a blunder.

It is true — but not so urgently, ground-breakingly, the-world-is-ending-so-move-faster-ly true as it seems.

The world moves slowly.

The modern man, at least in America, is all about doing something all the time. Even if it’s just sitting on the couch and watching Netflix. 

We greet one another these days with, “What have you been doing?”

And we answer, “Nothing.” 

But generally, that’s a lie. Generally, we’ve been doing something. 

For some people, “nothing” is a relative term — “nothing” refers to having two people over for dinner as opposed to twenty. Or just making dinner for someone else and taking it to then instead of having them come to you.

For others, “nothing” means going to work every day like normal, with no extra plans in the evening. 

Get up.

Eat breakfast. 

Get dressed.

Go to work. 

Come home.

Eat dinner.

Watch Netflix.

Go to bed.

Repeat. 

But even then you’re doing something. You’re going to work. You’re watching TV. But it’s not nothing. Maybe it feels like it means nothing — you’re just another of the faceless mob making sure the world keeps on running. That may be true.

But that’s for another day.

Some people say “nothing” and they mean a day on their yacht with no one else around. 

Well… I’m sure that’s not “nothing” to everyone without a yacht.

Very few people just go home and do nothing. 

But when I say “nothing” here, I still mean something.

I mean just — simply — sitting, outside, watching the world move.

It moves slowly. 

Grass grows. Forests advance and retreat up the sides of mountains like a green tidal wave. The sky fades. The ocean evaporates. The Grand Canyon vanishes. All just a little at a time… millimeter by slow millimeter. Leaf by leaf. Shade by shade. Drop by drop. Sand grain by sand grain.

The world moves slowly.

You have time to sit. 

Time to be.

To stay.

To see. 

Live.

Exist.

Experience.