The Smallest Things

It seems to come down to the smallest things. The longer I am here, the more I feel that, and the harder it is to explain.

The detail that shifts something you thought you knew. A touch that makes you feel warm without being asked to. The silence between two people that carries more than anything either of them could have said. These moments have always existed, but they're more visible to me now in a way I can't entirely account for — as though something in the practice has made me more permeable to them.

I'm genuinely not sure whether this is a stimulant the soul reaches for, something that reminds you you're alive on every level — or whether it's something simpler than that, just a thread of attention that keeps you curious enough to show up for another day. The longer I sit with the question, the less confident I am that I have the right answer, which I've started to find more amusing than troubling.

We all seem to feel the urgency to resolve the questions that, by their nature, were never going to be resolved. I understand the impulse. It's uncomfortable not to know. But a simple answer to a universal question is always going to be a simplification dressed up as an answer, and I don't trust those anymore.

So the practice stays the same: listen, keep quiet, move forward one step and one unanswered question at a time. Whatever I'm looking for on any given day can only be found in the depths of the practice itself — not in thinking about it from the outside.

Life here is lonely in a way I've made my peace with. I say that as a plain fact rather than a complaint. And I don't feel alone, which is a distinction that matters. I feel as though this path leads somewhere real and necessary, and that I will arrive there eventually through the practice of continuing to walk it. Where exactly and when — those are perhaps the questions that will never be answered.

There's something freeing about that if I let it be.