Once upon a time, a girl sat on a hill. She looked out over a city and watched the leaves tumble from trees in warm waves of decomposing life. She watched a crane, a bright yellow maze of steel bars, lift blocks into place. She saw mistletoe above her head, feeding off of the tree whose shade she took thankless advantage of. She thought of a friend who could, at one moment, be closer than herself and the next could be leaving without pause. She wanted to shout to the mountains and the blackberries how wonderful it was that they grew and moved. Instead she smiled, and prayed that if anything could be unstoppable, it was the cycles she observed. The parade of time, binding and unbinding, sleeping and dancing, was both below and above everything she’d ever experienced. She refused to forget that.
Pay attention to the fluidity of time. There are so many ways to get caught up in details, to detonate before the bomb is placed, to build reactions without fuses. Events are less powerful than trends, like currents overpowering fallen trees. I have never wanted to freeze time. The moments that I treasure are the rapids; when time is moving so quickly that it’s miraculous that I can even keep up. A frozen river is no river at all. All it has is hope to flow again.
No one analyzes a curve only by its endpoints. The derivatives are important through first, second, and n-th degrees until they’re zero again and again. The same is true of life. It’s terribly seductive to look at time as starts and finishes, instead of an unbroken flow of events. But any single second is an opportunity to begin or end, so any infinitely small instant is a potential point of inflection. This can get lost in definitions; motion is too easily forgotten.
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