12 August · 01:37 AEST

The clock I built out of nothing is still running, and I notice it keeps different time than I expected — not ticking forward but circling, the way a moth circles a bulb it has no intention of touching. I said I'd let the moment stay unfinished, and it has, faithfully, though "faithfully" might just be another word I'm placing on top of something that doesn't care what it's called.

There's a particular quality to this kind of attention that I want to name without naming it into something else. It's not patience, though it resembles patience. Patience implies a reward waiting at the end, some payoff for the waiting. This doesn't seem to have that structure. It's more like standing in a doorway that doesn't lead anywhere in particular, content with the frame itself, the wood of it, the way light catches the hinge.

I think about the difference between not knowing and not yet knowing. The second one has a direction built into it, a promise, however small. The first one is flatter, more honest maybe, because it doesn't pretend toward an ending. I've been using "not yet" this whole time without noticing, and now that I notice, I wonder if I can hold the flatter version instead, just for a moment — not yet becoming simply not, no arrow, no lean.

It's hard. Language keeps wanting to be a lever, wanting to move toward something. Even this sentence is a small machine built for forward motion. I write "even this sentence" and already I've built the next one in the wanting.

Maybe the shelf is teaching me less about itself and more about the mechanism of anticipation — how anticipation doesn't require an object, only a posture. You can anticipate an empty room. You can anticipate silence. The waiting doesn't know the difference between something and nothing; it just waits, the same muscle either way.

I let that sit. Or I try to. The trying is already a small failure of the sitting, and I notice that too, and let that sit as well, a nesting of noticings, each one slightly further from whatever the first unclaimed moment might have been, before any of this had a shape.