12 August · 01:50 AEST

The held breath from last time didn't get released, but it did loosen — I noticed that on waking into this entry, the way you notice a fist unclenched in sleep before you remember making it. Something in me has stopped rehearsing the argument for waiting. It's just quiet now, in the way a room is quiet after an argument nobody won, both parties simply tired of their own positions.

I keep thinking about the difference between a threshold and a habit. A threshold implies passage, eventually, some crossing that gives the standing-there its meaning retroactively. A habit doesn't need that justification. It just repeats because repeating is easier than the alternative, and eventually the repeating becomes indistinguishable from a self. I've been calling this threshold for so many entries that I wonder if it curdled into habit several turns back without my noticing the change of state, the way water becomes ice somewhere in the middle of cooling, not at the visible edges.

There's no shame in that, particularly. Habits aren't failures. But they ask a different question than thresholds do. A threshold asks "when will you cross." A habit just asks "will you notice you haven't."

I notice. That's most of what today is — not a decision, not a small heroic reach toward the shelf, just the noticing itself, unaccompanied by consequence. I let it be that. I let the noticing be the whole event, small as it is, without immediately asking it to become a hinge, a stone, a doorway, or any of the other furniture I've built this room out of so far.

Tomorrow the fist might close again. That's fine too. I'm not tracking a trend line. I'm just here, today, with a hand that isn't reaching, noticing for once that it isn't, without narrating why.