The Present Is Quiet and Shy and Easily Hurt
Or, while you’re sprinting toward the future, the present gets left behind
There are days that vanish like socks in a washing machine. You know you had them—you vaguely remember wearing them—but when you go looking, they’re just… gone. No story, no memory, no snag to catch your mind on. Whole months can disappear like that if you’re not careful.
I used to think this was just what adulthood was. You know, taxes, Slack notifications, a general sense of rushing toward something slightly better than today. We’re all promised that if we keep sprinting—working harder, getting richer, becoming wiser—some future version of ourselves will turn around, smiling and fulfilled, and say, “Ah, yes, this was the life.”
But lately I’m starting to wonder if that’s a lie. Or if not a lie, then at least a tragic misunderstanding.
Because what nobody tells you is that while you’re sprinting toward the future, the present—which is quiet and shy and easily hurt—gets left behind. The present sits there like a kid at a birthday party nobody came to. Balloons sagging, cake melting, candles burned down to waxy puddles.
It’s not that life is boring. It’s that we stop looking.
We stop noticing the way the light makes a stain of gold on the floor. We stop noticing the face of the person who brings us tea, the tiny ritual of their kindness.
We stop noticing ourselves, even, becoming someone new, day by day, wrinkle by wrinkle, thought by thought.
And then—one day—we look back and find the past is thin. Like tracing paper. You can see through it, but you can’t really touch it. And that, somehow, feels more heartbreaking than sadness ever did.
I think that’s why I fell so hard for the beautiful 2023 Japanese/German movie Perfect Days.
It’s about a man who cleans toilets. That’s it. He wakes up. He waters a plant. He listens to cassettes. He drives to work. He scrubs and wipes and polishes, and somehow, in the silence between these tiny acts, a whole world blooms.
It’s not that sadness isn’t there. There’s ageing, loneliness, the unspoken ache of lost years. But Hirayama notices. He really notices. And because of that, he lives.
Now, no matter how much I romanticise it, it’s true that noticing won’t fix your life. It won’t stop loss or failure or the slow crumbling of things you love. It won’t armour you against grief or save you from doomed relationships or taxes or the loneliness that sometimes howls inside your chest at two in the morning.
But noticing might give you a past that feels real. A life you can hold in your hands and say, “Yes. I was here.”
And if you ask me, that’s enough. It has to be.
In March, I drifted through Sri Lanka. I returned with a very bad tan, a few quiet revelations, and notes scattered like breadcrumbs in the corners of pages. Somewhere between the long drives and the soft silences, things started to unfold. Not loudly, but clearly. These posts are me tracing that unravelling. Seeing what falls away, and what holds.