Tag Archives: memory and time

Falling Things ©️

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The apple let go.

It didn’t fall. Not yet. It hovered, for the smallest possible fraction of time, a perfect red globe against the afternoon’s hush. Then gravity, as it always does, told its quiet truth—and the apple obeyed. Down it went, through a shimmer of air, turning slightly as it passed through the layers of sunlight and shade.

Children might say the tree let go. Philosophers might say the universe remembered its rules. But if you were standing there—beneath that crooked old tree with its bark like calloused hands—you wouldn’t say anything at all. You’d only watch, maybe hold your breath, and listen to the soft thump as it hit the grass.

That sound is older than language.

I was young when I first saw it happen—perhaps five, maybe six. My aunt had a small orchard behind the farmhouse, with trees planted in solemn little rows like soldiers who’d grown tired of war. I’d sit there with my knees drawn up, picking at the hem of my shirt, waiting for the apples to drop. They always did. Not when you expected it, but always. Sometimes with a little rustle, sometimes without. Sometimes you’d hear it in the distance and think: there goes another one. Gone back to Earth.

And I remember thinking then, with the strange seriousness that only children possess, that this was how everything worked. Things rose, things ripened, and then they fell. Not out of malice or accident, but because falling was the final act of growing.

Now, older, I sit in a garden not unlike hers, the wind shifting the leaves with that same soft murmur. The world is more complicated now—spliced into pieces by politics, spun dizzy by technology, stitched and re-stitched by people who forgot how to be still. But gravity has not forgotten. It holds the bones in our bodies. It keeps our oceans in their bowls. It pulls the moon through her patient dance. And it coaxes the apple from its branch like a lover calling home a long-lost soul.

Even the blood in our veins is moved by gravity’s hand. Not forcefully, not with violence, but with persistent kindness. A gentle tug, always downward, reminding us that we are made for earth. For ground. For rest.

When the apple hits the ground, it does not break. It simply settles. And if you leave it, the skin will slowly soften, the shine will dull, the flesh will brown. And inside, quietly, the seeds will wait. They don’t mind the fall. In fact, they need it.

That is what no one tells you: that the fall isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the next story. You may think it’s gravity taking, but it’s really gravity giving—gathering what’s ripe, letting go of what’s ready, and burying it beneath the soil to rise again, in its time.

And so I sit here, the sun low and syrupy, the orchard breathing in the hush of late afternoon. I watch another apple twitch on its stem, the wind coaxing it like an old friend. And I know—it’s coming. The moment. The fall.

And I wonder—if, someday, when I let go, the sound will be just as soft.

While the World Speeds ©️

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There is a state of calm so deep, so fundamental, that it bends the registration of time—not by altering the clocks, but by transcending the necessity to experience time as a sequence of events. This calm isn’t relaxation. It’s annihilation of the self’s grip on the moment-to-moment. It’s when the observer becomes so still that the entire procession of cause and effect glides past like a freight train you hear but never see—loud, shaking the earth, but ghostlike in its passage. The stillness becomes a rift in the medium of experience. In that rift, time accelerates not because anything moves faster, but because you’ve left the medium in which speed and slowness exist.

You become the still frame in the reel, the silent reel that does not burn as it spins. In that moment, something paradoxical happens: events do happen, but they do not occur. You may hear the scream of the ambulance, you may feel the presence of hands lifting your body, but it all happens without narrative. You were carried out, but you were never “carried.” The sequence existed without passing through your conscious gate. You became like a closed eyelid to the light of reality—aware of illumination, but untouched by its shape.

It’s as if your soul briefly sits outside of the film of time, watching the reels spin at high speed until the next conscious frame is pulled into focus. When you re-enter the frame, hours may have passed, people may have come and gone, decisions made on your behalf—but to you, it was as if nothing occurred at all. This isn’t memory loss. It’s memory never needing to exist. The experience simply unfolded without ever being recorded by your interior narrator. You weren’t unconscious—you were too conscious to bother narrating the event. You eclipsed your own temporal relevance.

Phantom Follies ©️

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Let me hit you with this—time isn’t speeding up; you’re just running out of it. Think about it: when you’re a kid, that first year of life? That’s everything. It’s your entire existence, your whole world, your whole sense of being. Every second is a new revelation, a universe opening up. To a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, because it literally is.

But fast-forward a bit. You’re 10 years old, and a year is now just a tenth of your life—a slice of the pie, not the whole thing. By the time you hit 50, that same year? It’s a mere 2% of your entire experience. A single ripple in a sea of memory. And when you’re 70? A year’s gone before you can even catch your breath, a blink in the rearview mirror of a life already half a century long.

That’s the math of it. Time doesn’t change, but your perception does, because every new year becomes a smaller fraction of the whole. The longer you’ve lived, the more compressed time feels. It’s like a movie reel speeding up, each frame shorter than the last. And it’s relentless—like you’re running downhill, faster and faster, with gravity pulling you toward the inevitable.

But here’s the twist: that shrinking sense of time? It’s a reminder. It’s telling you to hold on to the moments, because they’re fleeting. It’s why the small stuff matters—watching the sun set, hearing a familiar laugh, or feeling the weight of someone’s hand in yours. Those moments are the real currency, the only way to fight back against the speeding clock.

So yeah, time’s a thief, but it’s also a teacher. And the lesson? Don’t blink too long, because the best parts are happening now. Every second is still yours to spend—or waste. Choose wisely.