Living Inside the Ongoing: A Psychological Reflection on Time, Routine, and the Quiet Continuity of Being
The days run together now.
Morning dissolves into afternoon,
and the hours that once had shape
slide against each other like water.
Memory has stopped filing things neatly;
the mind can’t tell one Tuesday from the next.
I keep doing what steadies me—
the small mercies of order,
lecture plans, laundry folded, the smell of coffee brewing, furniture rearranged, emails unanswered, surfaces cleared.
Repetition becomes a form of safety,
a pact with time itself:
if I move through the same gestures,
maybe the world will stay familiar.
It’s strange how comfort feels heavier now,
how routine can cradle and confine in the same gesture.
I used to think structure meant freedom,
now I see it’s also a soft restraint—
a way of holding back the chaos
without noticing what it costs.
Outside, the world insists on renewal.
I hear young laughter through the open window,
the sound of beginnings I once thought endless.
Their mornings are just starting,
and mine—though still lit—
feels closer to the afternoon.
The light comes at an angle these days,
beautiful, slanted, harder to stand in for long.
Time used to feel like motion.
Now it feels like accumulation.
Each day another thin layer of dust,
another sediment of memory
covering what was once clear.
The psychologist in me knows
this is how the brain conserves energy—
compressing years into feelings,
turning the continuous into a blur, saving it to one day be distorted in a dream.
I no longer chase meaning through achievement.
Meaning now arrives in small witnesses:
Pepper stretching his little leg into sunlight,
the smell of cinnamon raisin bread toasting,
the hum of jazz in the background, the click of a light switch before sleep.
Perhaps that’s all consciousness ever wanted—
to notice itself noticing.
The rest was just noise,
anxious performance dressed as purpose. Doing and going and going and doing and doing and going and going and doing.…
There is a tenderness in fatigue,
a gentleness born of having tried for so long; to be seen, to be heard… to be understood.
The sharp edges of striving wear down
until what’s left is something rounder,
something that doesn’t cut
when held in the hand.
It’s a kind of integration—
the psyche folding in on itself,
no longer fighting the rhythm it can’t control.
Sometimes I think of my younger self
as someone to whom I still owe a response—
his urgency, his unfinished sentences
still echo in these rooms.
I wonder if he’d recognize me now,
if he’d understand that peace
can look like surrender from a distance.
He once believed growth meant ascent;
I’ve learned it’s more like softening,
a slow reconciliation with gravity.
The future no longer calls to me
the way it once did.
It hums quietly beneath the floorboards,
a vibration I can feel but not name.
The mind once lived in tomorrow;
now it lingers in the middle distance,
aware of both the fading and the becoming.
What matters seems to live closer,
within reach,
like the steady pulse behind the wrist.
I watch the sunlight climb the wall
and think of how every day
performs its own vanishing act—
the same sky, but never the same light.
Maybe awareness is nothing more
than learning to love impermanence
without needing to own it.
The chores call to me again—
the cooking, the laundry, the dishes,
the careful tending of the ordinary.
Each task a small affirmation:
I am still here.
I am still answering the world
in the only language it fully understands: attention.
And though time keeps blurring,
I am still here,
hands on the computer keys,
Pepper on my shoulder,
sun sliding across the floor,
living within the small continuity
that outlasts intention—
to belong to something enduring,
to leave something behind,
each line a quiet offering
to the passing of light.
-RJ Starr