The Wheelbarrow
I set the wheelbarrow down at the top of the hill. Dogs beside me. Nothing left to do.
That's the whole scene. No task waiting, no plan for the next ten minutes. Just hands, empty, and a body that has just finished something.
The wind picks up sweeping from my feet drawing my attention up hundreds of feet into the billowing canopy.
Caring for my presence.
The words arrive like that — not summoned, not reasoned into. A voice that isn't quite mine and isn't quite outside me either. Something to hear, not something I generate.
I don't chase it. I just walk. The hill, the dogs, the quiet after work. I let it arrive at its own pace.
Five minutes later I pick up my phone to open a game I know too well. And something in me watches the motion happen — watches my own hand — and sees the whole rest of the loop before it starts. Not a thought. More like a preview. This branch doesn't grow anywhere. It is a dead end, the same shape over and over, going nowhere new.
I turn the game off. Delete it. Set the phone back down.
The choice is quiet. Not dramatic. Just definite.
I want to stay honest about what that was, because it would be easy to write it as a clean win. It wasn't clean. It was closer to catching myself mid-fall and grabbing another branch I didn't know was there. A branch which happens to be what you are reading now. One that does light me up.
Here's what I'm still sitting with: caring for my presence and the game auto-loop happening five minutes apart, in the same body, on the same walk. One leaves me full. One would have left me looped. I don't have the clean answer for what tells them apart. What I have is this — arriving is painstaking, almost annoyingly so. Presence isn't the easy path even when I know, structurally, it's the better one. The loop is easier. It's built to be. That's what makes it a loop. No matter how painstaking and arduous the journey is, the view in the canopy is worth it, each and every moment.
So I'm not writing this because I solved anything on the hill. I'm writing it because I want to understand how I caught the gap — the half-second where the hand hasn't decided yet — and I want to leave a trace of what that gap actually feels like from inside it, before the story hardens into something tidier than it was. Exploring open questions like: does presence breed presence? And how does one truly train oneself for a new branch rather than an old loop?
I find myself on another branch instead. The one I've been growing this whole time, without quite noticing how much light it's already getting. I’ll keep tending this one for me, and maybe you will enjoy the view of it too.
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