There was a stream in me once. It moved every day — small, constant, unremarkable, mine. I would sit and write and the water would come gushing out, thoughts like stream of consciousness — sparking spirit and life.
In my twenties I thought I understood most of what mattered.
I carried a kind of clarity then — arrogant, maybe, but as clear as day. I don't have it anymore.
The older I got, the more the world seemed to close around me even as it seemed to open. Wider in what was possible, narrower in what was actually still mine to reach for. Time, life, burdens, responsibilities, and other excuses seemingly weighed me down.
Some of it was only busyness. A book I couldn't finish because a screen kept pulling my eyes back to it. A walk outside that was never really outside, because some part of me stayed with the phone, waiting for a buzz, a missed message, a notification I'd have to answer for.
There was no space left in the day to actually think — not think about something, just think, the way water thinks by moving.
And some of it was age doing what age does: the confidence in myself grew larger every year, the sense of what I should be able to do by now — and at the very same time, what the world would still let me do, what time would still let me do, kept shrinking.
I did not understand, for a long time, that both of these could be true together. That a self could grow bigger while its room to move grew smaller.
That was the narrowness. Not less possibility — less time to reach it in.
Somewhere in there, the stream stopped.
Water that doesn't move is supposed to do one of three things: get bottled up, burst out, or go stagnant and die. Mine didn't burst. It just went still. Still, still, still…
Until I noticed the stillness had a name, and the name was: my life has not moved much at all.
I found rocks in the water.
Some had simply rolled there — the ordinary weight of getting older, of days filling up faster than I could empty them. But others I had placed myself, on purpose, half-knowing what I was doing. Because to let the water move sometimes means going somewhere I was afraid to go. I was afraid of moving the rocks.
And afraid, just as much, of what would happen if the water actually got through.
I don't have a lesson on the other side of that fear. What I have instead is this: at some point I understood I had no choice left but to do something with what was in front of me.
Move what I could move. Flow around what wouldn't move. Sit beside what was only ever going to stay, and keep going anyway. Staying still, it turned out, was the one option that had quietly stopped being available to me.
These pages are not that lesson, if there is one.
They are not arranged to teach or to resolve anything — they are arranged the way thinking actually happens, by feeling and by theme rather than by logic, moving between what already happened, what is happening, and what hasn't yet, without much order to any of it.
This is only my own sense of time, set down as honestly as I could set it down.
If you are reading this, I don't imagine you the way age or a milestone would define you.
I imagine you at whatever point the world has started to feel like too much to carry — the challenges ahead too large, the ground too uncertain.
I don't know if there's anything here that will help.
But if it helps at all, I hope it's this: that your current is not the only one that has gone still. Somewhere else in this same universe, another stream stopped too — and found its way to move again, however it could.
There is a place still yours to find. I hope, in some small way, these pages help move your stream along — remove the rocks holding back your waterfall.