Friday 16th January. am

He woke before the house did.

The hour sat lightly on the rooms, the sort of hour that doesn’t announce itself. His mother slept. The Airbnb guest slept. The dog was not yet with him. He stood at the bay window and let the day arrive without interpretation. Roofs, a rinsed sky, the far-off hum of the motorway—movement everywhere, but not here.

He noticed the difference. How motion could happen without arrival. How people could be in a place and not be there at all. Earlier in the week he’d watched men in lycra bolt uphill, talking as if tethered to an invisible machine. Healthy, yes—but absent. The body doing, the mind elsewhere. He felt the faint grief of it, not judgement, just the ache of contact missed.

The hum of traffic before six came back to him. All that early movement to shift things from one container to another so other things could be had. He felt the sadness of it—the endless doing that keeps the machine upright and fear fed. He prayed quietly that peace would be allowed to remain peace, that anger wouldn’t keep being passed down like inheritance.

Thoughts turned, as they sometimes did, to the figures people use to organise their fear. He caught himself checking the noise and closed it again. Not information—stimulation. He didn’t want it in his morning.

Friends came into view without being summoned. One unhappy, using hatred as structure. Another loved, successful, guarded—concerned about theft in an empty pub, about protection where none was needed. He saw how fear can live comfortably inside success, how spirituality can be turned into management. He loved them still.

He remembered why he had shared his work. Not for praise. Not for a future imagined as publishing or permission. He had wanted questions. He had wanted to be seen. The fear beneath that want showed itself without drama: not wanting to steer alone forever.

The morning held him while older companions gathered themselves again—walking, Zen, the Dao, a book that had once been a rope when he was going under. He remembered setting off years ago, angry and afloat, and how the tools had not saved him by answers but by subtraction. He understood now that what remained had become a function of his existence. Not chosen. Survived into.

He recognised the Way as mechanics rather than belief: how walking corrects itself when you stop forcing; how forgiveness releases when misperception drops; how not adding is sometimes the most exact action. He felt no urge to convince anyone. Understanding had no need to announce itself.

Time passed. Coffee was taken without urgency. Food was provisioned without insistence. The fast he’d entered was not about denial but accuracy—no feeding of noise. He stayed seated in public stillness and let the moment finish its sentence.

Practicalities arrived and were met plainly. Medication required care; the body’s intelligence counted as hunger. He adjusted without story.

At nine, the dog would return. Before that, a walk. After that, the day would carry its proper weight again. He picked up his book and read for a while, not to add anything, but to rest where he was.

The morning did not conclude with meaning. It concluded with sufficiency.