Do you need time?
Wednesday, 5th November 2025
At the window, the harbour is slow‑breathing and deliberate, as if the water had decided to keep a steadier pulse than the rest of us managed today. The hours kept nudging – less a question than a posture – and by dusk it felt clear the day wanted wider margins, not a longer page.
The cold that began yesterday lingered in the railings and the bones of the house, but tonight it gentled into something more companionable – winter not arriving with banners, just with the tact of someone who knows the room already. Between patients I moved the blue chair two inches toward the window and found that the light, which has been angling with November’s modesty, landed kinder on the notebook; small geometry, small relief. Marcus sent me off this morning with a knowing look and the better of his beans – he claims Wednesday is when people try to outrun themselves and should not do so on mediocre coffee. Tom calibrated the day with a weather report at the kerb, hands in his pockets, the Delaware looking like brushed steel; he has the gift of naming the sky in a sentence and letting you do the rest.
Sessions were the honest kind – no breakthroughs to photograph, just two people keeping company with what hurts until it becomes speakable and then slightly less frightening; it’s work that rewards patience on a scale calendars can’t flaunt. Some days the task is to hold a long pause without dressing it up, to trust that silence isn’t negligence but nursing – an unglamorous ministry of attention. By mid‑afternoon, the office felt like a harbour within the harbour, and that was enough to keep the impulse to hurry from commandeering the rest of the day.
Maggie’s message arrived between appointments – final notes for Thursday’s signage walk‑through – and I felt again that quiet satisfaction when clinical habits translate into civic furniture: language that invites rather than polices, rest spots that assume dignity as a default. Two patients yielded their Thursday hours with good grace because the explanation was plain and human; it still startles me how often decency does the scheduling better than force. Tim waved from the river path just after sunrise – no talk today, merely a benediction at twenty paces; there is a monastic comfort in knowing the same pair of boots keeps showing up to the same strip of path.
I’m learning to keep time rather than spend it, which sounds pious until you recall how quickly keeping becomes clutching; the trick is looser fingers. This afternoon I practised the unheroic art of doing one task at a time – write the letter, then stand, then breathe, then rinse the cup – and discovered (again) that my nervous system takes instruction best when the choreography is pedestrian. If there’s a ledger here, it isn’t of achievements but of returned attention: a jaw unclenched between sessions, a breath that reaches the back of the ribs, an evening not surrendered to the inbox.
Family threaded through, as they do – Susan’s voicemail about a school play and Matthew’s night rotation shifting his sleep like a deck of cards; their lives mark the week more reliably than any planner ever has. I’m grateful for the ordinary drumbeat of them, even when the calls are brief and the jokes land on delay; it keeps my days from drifting into a single‑purpose instrument.
Dan had slipped a slim book of essays into a brown paper bag – “for when you’re pretending not to work” – and it waited on the sideboard all day like a small dare to be off‑duty. He is eerily accurate about what my mind will tolerate after 7 p.m., and tonight the opening paragraph already sounded like someone putting a hand on the kettle and saying, gently, not yet. Across the afternoon, New Corinth did its usual theatre of restraint – forklifts whispering at the renovated warehouses, gulls performing their aggrieved operetta, the river making its case for patience without once raising its voice.
A text from Andrea in Wilmington – quarterly lunch overdue, a photo of a café table that looks like a promise – had me smiling into the lamplight at how some friendships stay slightly lit even when you aren’t tending them. Jonathan’s name in the inbox with three words – “Call when free” – was the gentler summons; training companions have a way of hearing the unbroadcast frequencies and offering less advice than oxygen. Both of them are reminders that time with the right people dilates, refusing the accountant’s logic; a lavishness hidden inside ordinary hours.
The watercolour kit from last night is still out on the table: wrong brush for the paper, but the green I made by accident is exactly the harbour’s second hour after storm, and that feels like licence to keep being a beginner in public. New attempts always look costly in the shop window and then arrive, when paid for, like a relief; the bill was only the price of being seen trying. If adulthood has a curriculum no one announces, perhaps this week’s unit is “tolerate the unfinished” with a practical on “leave the brush out and see what asks to be added”.
Nothing dramatic to report on the domestic front, which is its own kind of news; the kettle knows where it lives, the books are in benign disorder, and the coat finally dried from this morning’s stubborn mist. I left a note at the café counter for a neighbour who will be in tomorrow before me – simple logistics masquerading as companionship – and was amused by how the smallest errands can carry more tenderness than the grand gestures we postpone indefinitely. New Corinth is very good at teaching this, perhaps because it remembers how to be useful without fuss; the town keeps its vows in small print.
What did the day want from me beyond competence? – to go slower at the edges so the centre could hold without teeth clenched. If anyone asked whether more hours would help, the honest answer is that more room would; an extra beat before the reply, an unfilled quarter‑hour that protects the one after it. Time, it turns out, is less a commodity than a manner of touch, and when held that way even November can feel less like loss and more like a faithful metronome.
The lamp is doing that thing it does at ten to ten – softening into permission; I’ll take the hint, close the book at the end of a paragraph, and let tomorrow arrive unbriefed.
Clinical note to self, with a wink: widen the margins first, then check the calendar.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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