An Afterthought on Still
Day 38 — Afternoon Contemplation
This afternoon I listened to a talk by Thomas Hübl. He stopped on a single word.
Still.
Still doing this. Still working on that. Still connected. Still waiting. He was not making a grammatical point. He was pointing at something the word reveals when you look at it directly: that still is a position marker. It names a place where movement has not happened. Where something that perhaps should have resolved — or changed, or ended — is being held in place by a force that often goes unnamed.
I went looking in thirty-eight days of writing.
Day 8. A platform in Martensdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. A train I had missed while daydreaming about Müllrose, about a daughter turning eleven, about a woman who had sent a photograph through a car window without a word. I stood on the wrong platform and watched the train go.
The post I wrote from that platform was titled: Still on the Right Train.
The closing line: The train you are on is still the right train. It is just the next one.
I thought I was writing about adaptability. About the pilgrim's relationship to what doesn't go according to plan. And I was. But underneath that — the word doing its quieter work — was something else. A reassurance. A position being defended. I have not lost my way. Which is what you say when some part of you is not entirely sure.
Hübl's point is not that the word is wrong. It is that it is useful — if you are willing to ask what it is holding in place.
The pilgrimage is now thirty-eight days old. The decision matrix runs until June 18. The needs series runs until May 10. The work of both is the same work the word "still" resists: moving from a frozen position into what is actually true now, in this body, in this place, at this point in the arc.
Not still on the right train.
On the train. Watching the landscape change.
Day 38c — Phase 6 — Taste — Small Intestine — Diamond — Ecclesiastes
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
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