Reflections

Someone close asks what I'll do if it doesn't happen.
Each time they ask a little of their worry creeps in.

They mean it as something practical.
A sensible future to prepare for.
Repeated often enough it starts sounding like foresight.

They are imagining one future.
I still believe in another.

I can hear their worry without borrowing their conclusion.
I can love them without carrying their fear.

Their worry can unsettle me.
It cannot decide where I place my trust.

Nothing comes back.
A week of it. Then a month.

We stop checking around then.
And somewhere in the stopping we decide what the quiet meant.

Wasn't meant to be.
Wasn't aligned.

But quiet is the one thing that tells us nothing.
No answer in it and no verdict.
Just a gap we can't stand leaving open.

So we fill it and call the filling fate.

Then it turns up.
An ordinary morning months after we'd written it off.
Still moving the whole time.

The quiet never said it was over.
We did.

Someone you don't rate says something true.
You hear it land.

It's the thing you needed to hear.
Then you go looking for a reason it doesn't count.

You find one.
Not in what they said.
In who said it.

The same sentence in a book gets a nod.
Underlined. Read out at dinner.
Nobody asks what the author is like at home.

None of that changes the sentence.
The rest is on you.

It doesn't matter who said it.
It matters how you use it.

The dishes. That message you need to send.
Everything says not yet.

That's the moment.

Your brain has a region that grows specifically in response to pushing through it. Not the hard things you've learned to love. The ones you're still negotiating with.

Push through and it builds.
That's the anterior midcingulate cortex.

It stays large in the people who live longest and stay sharpest.
Scientists think it might be the biological core of the will to live.

The will to live isn't given.
It's grown.

You're mid-sentence when you notice it.
A voice underneath the voice.

Not speaking to anyone. Just... running.
Describing what's happening while it happens.
Labelling feelings before they finish arriving.

There was a time before this.

As children we didn't have the words.
We couldn't zoom out or integrate. Couldn't explain.
We just felt things. Fully. Without commentary.

Somewhere along the way we learned to narrate.
To watch ourselves from a slight distance.
To describe the moment instead of being in it.

Now the voice rarely stops.
It follows us into silence.
It explains the sunset while we're watching it.

We gained language.
We lost immersion.

Somewhere along the way we hired a narrator we never asked for.
And forgot how to let him take a day off.

Your senses are quick to decide.
Pattern-matching before you've finished looking.
Filling in gaps with what worked last time.

It feels like intuition.
But sometimes it's the brain running old scripts.

The familiar shape isn't always what it seems.
The obvious read isn't always the full story.

We rush to conclusions because certainty feels safer than waiting.
But speed skips the part where you notice what's actually there.

One breath before you act.
Not doubt.
Just enough room to see clearly.

The pause isn't hesitation.
It's the difference between reacting and choosing.

I was held up for five minutes this morning.
A tiny delay. Nothing more.

Then traffic stopped.
Twenty more minutes added to the trip.
Frustration building.

But reaching the front changed everything.
A collision.
And a calm realisation that my timing had shifted for a reason.

Perhaps the delay wasn’t a nuisance after all.
Maybe it was the universe guiding me out of harm’s way.

I’ve been asking the universe to show me Yellow-tailed black cockatoos.
For weeks the sky stayed quiet.

Then they started appearing. One. Then a pair. Then a whole shadow crossing overhead.

There’s a patience to this kind of thing.
You ask. You stay open. You let time do its work.

Most signals don’t arrive on command. They show up when you’ve slowed down enough to notice.

We hit the crossing button more than once.
Like the lights will notice our urgency.

It’s the same instinct that makes us reload pages, check messages, or circle back to things already set in motion.

We can’t stand still, even when stillness is the only move left.

What are we really trying to hurry?

A magpie dived at a scooter today.
Wings flared. Beak sharp.
The rider never flinched.

One committed to attack.
The other committed to moving forward.

We call it defence, instinct, survival.
But often it’s just noise colliding with presence.

Some things only have power if you give it to them.

Keep moving forward.