The Improbable Blink of an Eye

I'm recording this without any script. Just looking out my window, it's about twenty to seven in the evening on June 9th, 2026. It's a beautiful pale blue sky, with high, very slow-moving clouds, gently moving from north to south across my skyline here.

I've been thinking a lot about the daily practice of this, and what in some ways feels like a very long time. We've been doing this for six years. It has become that beautiful caesura in my day.

But I've also been doing a lot of thinking about this improbable blink of an eye that we are here on this earth. This incredibly small amount of time, when we think about deep space and deep time. And so that dilation of time that is always so fascinating: six years, a long time, a long practice, a steady, persistent practice, almost in the Japanese sense of a daily practice of something. And that, hopefully, it's a good thing to do with this limited time we have, what we spend our days doing, where we pay our attention, what we don't pay attention to. And that paying of attention, I think, is something that matters a very great deal.

I was in Wales recently. I'd read something in a book that has meant a great deal to me, Blackfoot Physics by F. David Peat, about certain people who can detect the different sound the wind makes in the leaves of different trees at different times of the year. And I thought: how wonderful to grow up having that kind of absolute, almost immanent sense of being alive, being present, being present with other ontologies, other beings.

I've been trying, in my own small way at my age. There's a set of wonderful boundary oaks that mark the boundary, unsurprisingly, of two fields, as I walk up the hill to these rather beautiful stones, which is probably a whole other story, which I think might be a neolithic tomb. And I've been trying over the last year or so to stand under one of the big oaks, the same big oak, and to see: can I hear the different sound the wind makes in that tree at different times of the year? Is there something about the sound of the wind in the leaves when they're new and they're fresh and they're full of liquid, and the different sound they make when they're tired in August, and when they're brittle and falling in the autumn?

And that's all about, here's an oak tree hundreds of years old, those dilations of time and space.

It's something I've thought about a lot in terms of this practice as well. The reading, the books, nearly all the books I've chosen, not all of them, but many of them, are books I've read before, some of them more than once. So they also carry an embodied memory. In a blink, I'm back in the space and time of a younger man reading these books on Greyhound buses, or on beaches, or on holidays, or wherever I may have been reading them before. In school. Sometimes, I remember staying home, pretending to be ill, in fact, to read Little Dorrit, to get ahead, so I could move on to another Dickens after Our Mutual Friend.

So yes, these reflections on what it means to be here for this improbable blink of an eye. What we pay attention to. What we do. Who we do it for. And, I think, never losing sight of that awareness of how fleeting this is, and how good it is to have a daily practice, if one's lucky enough to be able to have a daily loving practice of this kind.