What’s something you believe everyone should know.
Thursday, 30th October 2025
The kettle clicks off and, in the thin quiet after steam, a small instruction makes itself known: start where the hand already is, not where the mind thinks it ought to be.
There’s a chipped shell on the sill beside the harbour-facing window, its inner sheen dulled by October air, and the thumb finds it without looking – an old habit, like checking one’s pulse, except the thing being counted is attention. Yesterday’s wishes felt operatic in the making and oddly evaporative by dusk; today’s work is humbler, more local, a kind of noticing that asks nothing fancy from bravery beyond its willingness to stay.
Between sessions, the river sounded like paper being slowly folded – creases laid down by wind you can’t see, only trace – and it struck me again that the body keeps a more honest calendar than the diary, signalling what’s true before the head consents to write it. If there is anything worth everyone knowing, perhaps it is this: attention, offered without demand, is an act that changes both the giver and the given-to.
Marcus set my tea down without ceremony at the corner table – he has a private semaphore for difficult mornings – and left the milk as if it might be needed and might not, which is its own kind of kindness. Tom lifted two fingers in greeting as he crossed Harbour Street, the hip more temperamental today but his pace still possessed of that quiet dignity that refuses to make a fuss. At lunch, Dan slipped a small beginner’s brush into the paper bag with the half-pans he’d put aside earlier in the week, a conspiratorial addendum he didn’t name, which made it land all the more clearly as care.
In the room, people told the truth at the speeds available to them. A man sat in careful silence until the fourth minute and then laid, very gently, the phrase I can’t forgive myself on the rug between us as if it might bruise, and what he needed – what most of us need – was not my brilliance but my unflustered remaining. A teenager recited a list of reasons not to hope with the fluency of someone who’s practised to defend against interruption; it took two breaths longer than usual to ask whether the list had to end there, and in those two breaths the room remembered what space can do.
I think about how much of our harm isn’t spectacular but cumulative – little abrasions of being misunderstood, hurried, tidied, judged – and how the inverse medicine is equally small and steady: to be seen accurately, slowly, without appetite. People imagine therapy is answers dressed in clinical grammar; most days it’s simply the discipline of not looking away.
Maggie sent a short clip from the oral history project while I was between notes – Dot Williams describing the shipyard sirens of her childhood as “a clock everyone obeyed,” which is both history and metaphor if you let it be. We live by clocks we never consciously chose – family tempos, professional metronomes, the civic beat of places like New Corinth – and the first rebellion is learning which you can set down without the whole song collapsing.
Jenny wrote to ask if I’d like to borrow a book on pigment that “will only overwhelm you slightly,” which is why she has always been useful: she trusts me to try and fail without footnotes of reassurance. Father Walsh’s message arrived just after sunset – no theology, just a photograph of the boardwalk in that peculiar twilight where edges blur and colours admit they’ve been guessing – captioned simply: Walk tomorrow?
And then David’s name blinked up, plain as a doorbell: two lines about a rehearsal passage that wouldn’t behave and a joke about Bartók being the patron saint of beautifully unresolved matters. We are trading in small currencies, which is to say we are attempting honesty at a human scale; there is relief in not needing to declare anything beyond presence.
What should everyone know? Not the grand, decal-ready truths – those evaporate under weather – but the apprenticeships that hold when spectacle fails. That rest is not a prize for productivity but the ground from which any good work grows. That grief does not respect itineraries. That courage, as it turns out, is largely repetition. That intimacy is a practice, not a performance, and that practice looks like letting yourself be slightly less defended than is comfortable, repeatedly, with the right people.
There are subclauses. That attention is not the same as scrutiny; the former warms, the latter chills. That boundaries protect tenderness rather than prevent it. That being ordinary is not a demotion – only a relinquishing of costume – so your hands are free for other work.
I am fifty-eight and still learning how to do the small things that make those sentences true. I sign my name to a class that will expose my beginner’s hands and then, when the hour arrives, I attend, even if my lines look like river weather more than bridges. I say yes to music beside someone whose careful voice does not attempt to master a room. I answer Maggie’s questions without editing the life into an allegory. I let Tom’s economy of gesture stand as complete conversation. I accept Marcus’s milk left and not used as a blessing I don’t have to deserve.
Late afternoon, the shell on the sill had warmed under a wink of sun, and lifting it, the scent of salt ghosted the air – a trick of memory rather than geography, but the body believed it. That is the other thing worth knowing: the body keeps receipts for what the mind denies – relief, dread, recognition – and if you treat it as hostile evidence, you will miss the testimony that might spare you from older harms.
The Québec confirmation sits in my inbox like a dare written in a sensible font. It is both too much and exactly enough; it will teach me nothing new about cathedrals and everything new about whether I am willing to be unremarkable in a city where no one needs me to be anything but present.
Dusk in New Corinth does its familiar softening – the harbour cranes becoming silhouettes, voices thinning as the river takes its due – and the day closes its ledger without balance. Some things moved and some did not; some sentences found endings and some declined. If there is a single knowledge to carry, perhaps it is that we are shaped by what we attend to, and attending is a choice available even when control is not.
So tonight the practice is small: shell back on the sill, lamp low, brush rinsed and left to dry, phone facedown but not banished. Tomorrow will bring whatever it brings – the walk, the work, the awkward tenderness of being seen a little more than is comfortable – and the work will be the same: offer attention like a local kindness and let it be enough.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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