Soap Box Corner

Lately, I’ve felt myself drifting. Meditation, which once gave me a sense of quiet refuge, has grown restless. I still sit, still breathe, but the stillness doesn’t settle like it used to. Instead, I find myself circling a quiet suspicion: that all I do, all I strive for, might rest on no foundation at all.

Days pass as if through mist. Weekends vanish, not in the busy blur of errands and plans, but in a kind of eerie silence, as though time itself has turned tidal, pulling forward and back until beginnings blur with endings.

Time. We speak of it casually, but it has grown strange to me. It stretches and contracts in ways I can’t quite grasp. A week feels endless while I live it, yet in retrospect it shrinks to a single blink. Maybe time is less a thing and more a story we tell ourselves, a fiction that slips through our hands even as we try to hold it.

And yet, I’ve found comfort here. Not because time denies meaning, but because it frames everything: suffering, ambition, love, all placed inside a vastness where nothing needs to last, and yet everything is permitted to be. This doesn’t feel like nihilism to me. It feels like awe. That we exist at all, that we think and wonder and reach for the stars, seems miraculous, even in the face of impermanence.

Sometimes I imagine none of this is real. I imagine that I lie unconscious somewhere, and this life is a dream spun from memory and longing. That one day I might wake up, and every name, face, ache, and joy will vanish. Oddly, the thought is both haunting and freeing.

I want to write something lasting, something true. But even that desire feels fragile against the silence. Words scatter like echoes, never quite reaching. And still, I write. Perhaps not to be remembered, but simply to leave a whisper of presence in the void.

Stillness no longer feels like clarity. It feels like drifting with awareness, allowing questions to remain unanswered. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but I wonder if examination is less about answers and more about staying awake, letting uncertainty breathe beside us. Plato called time “the moving image of eternity.” Maybe my task is not to solve that image, but to witness it.

And there is a strange peace in witnessing. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, say, and think.” I don’t read this as a warning. I read it as an invitation, not to urgency but to presence.

So I write, not to be understood or remembered, but as a quiet affirmation: I am here. I see. And I will not turn away.

Recollection for the day:
“Presence matters more than permanence; to witness life, even in its drifting, is enough.”