time folds into dust
when the hands forget to count—
we become the thing
There are moments when time forgets its shape.
It slips through cracks in your concentration, like water down the side of a teapot, following gravity’s whisper. You sit down with an idea, and when you next look up, the sun has changed color. The world outside the window has grown quieter, or louder, or simply different.
Time isn’t lost. It just… reconfigures.
There’s a woman I used to know who said the best hours are the ones you never meant to spend. We were in a Kyoto cafe at the time. She was sketching something in the corner of a napkin. I don’t remember what it was—just the curve of her wrist moving like it had something to say.
This list isn’t a list, not really. More like a set of rooms I return to. Rooms without clocks. Spaces where meaning hums faintly beneath the wallpaper.
And in those spaces, I vanish just enough to remember who I am.
1. Building Something You Care About
The woodshop in my grandfather’s backyard always smelled of linseed oil and forgotten plans. I once spent a whole summer afternoon trying to fix the busted leg of a kitchen stool. The radio was on. Cicadas buzzed like static. At some point, the air turned purple.
Later in life, it became code. Lines and functions instead of hammers and nails. But the feeling was the same: tweak, run, adjust, breathe. Hours slid by like fish in a stream.
Sometimes I forget to eat. Sometimes I forget I have a body. All that remains is intention and response. A dance between idea and resistance.
In those moments, I am ten years old again, sanding splinters from the world.
2. Deep Reading
I once read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle during a snowstorm. The power went out, so I sat by candlelight and let the story devour me. I forgot the cold. Forgot dinner. Forgot my own name for a little while.
Reading isn’t escape. It’s alchemy. You absorb a stranger’s thoughts until they become your own. The walls of your self stretch, creak, take on new light.
Certain books change your posture. You stand differently after them.
They rearrange your silence.
3. Writing to Clarify Your Thoughts
There’s a quiet desperation that builds inside you when you haven’t written in a while. Words pile up like unread letters.
I once stayed up all night trying to write a single paragraph about grief. When morning came, I had fifteen pages and no memory of how they got there. I’d brewed tea that had gone cold, reheated it, let it go cold again.
Writing is how I talk to parts of myself that don’t answer to names. It’s a séance. An excavation.
I don’t write to be understood. I write so I can understand.
4. Learning a High-Leverage Skill
In Tokyo, I tried to learn shakuhachi—the bamboo flute. My teacher was a man who looked like he hadn’t spoken aloud in a decade. He made me sit on a tatami mat for three full sessions before I was allowed to make a sound.
“Breath before music,” he said.
Now, when I learn anything new—whether it’s logic puzzles or Italian verbs—I think of him. The silence before skill. The humility in repetition.
The magic happens when you forget you’re learning.
You just do the thing. And the thing reshapes you.
5. Solving Hard Problems
Once, I spent seven hours debugging a script that turned out to be missing a single semicolon. I felt like a monk discovering a missing grain of rice.
But there was beauty in it. The narrowing of focus. The slow peeling away of everything nonessential. Just you, the problem, and the invisible hand that dares you to try again.
Hard problems aren’t cruel. They’re invitations.
You don’t solve them. You enter into conversation with them.
6. Meditation and Breathwork
There’s a point in sitting—usually around the 18-minute mark—when the mind slips its leash.
Not in a dramatic way. Just a gentle drift. Like stepping out of a train car and realizing the landscape has shifted.
I’ve sat through storms, both internal and literal. The body itches. The clock mocks you. But then it breaks—like a fever. And what’s left is just breath. The body breathing itself. Time without labels.
It feels like being a stone at the bottom of a river.
And for once, the current is kind.
7. Long, Unscripted Conversations
A friend and I once talked from midnight to sunrise. No wine. No agenda. Just tea and open windows and the smell of early July.
We talked about god, regret, womb memories, first kisses. Laughed until our ribs hurt. Sat in silence when the stories ran out.
There’s a sacredness to conversation that isn’t trying to impress or persuade. It just is.
Like jazz. Like shadow puppets. Like memory before it hardens.
8. Creating Art or Music
In Ljubljana, I bought a small set of Japanese brushes and a bottle of sumi ink. I didn’t know what I was painting—just that the ink moved like it had its own nervous system.
Some afternoons I play one note on an old guitar over and over until it sounds like something it wasn’t before. It’s not music. It’s meditation with vibration.
Art doesn’t care who sees it.
It only asks that you leave something behind.
9. Exploring Nature
I once followed a deer trail in the hills above Piran and didn’t come back until moonrise. No GPS. No plan. Just that soft hum of “keep going.”
There’s a rhythm to walking without destination. Your feet negotiate with the earth. Your breath syncs with pine and birdsong.
Sometimes I find strange stones and put them in my pocket. Sometimes I talk to trees like they’re old friends who forgot my name.
Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just listens.
And then, slowly, it teaches you how to listen too.
10. Teaching or Mentoring
There’s a boy I used to tutor who thought he was bad at math. I watched him go from shame to pride in three months, just by learning how to reframe the way he saw numbers.
One afternoon, he solved a problem and looked up like he’d heard music.
“Wait,” he said, “I actually get it.”
Time stopped for both of us in that moment. Not because of math. But because connection reclaims time from routine.
Teaching isn’t about transferring knowledge. It’s about borrowing each other’s wonder.
Wabi-sabi lesson:
Time slips away most beautifully when you’re not trying to keep it.
Each of these moments—reading, building, breathing, walking, speaking—are not escapes. They’re reunions.
You don’t lose time. You lose watching it. And in that vanishing act, something sacred appears.
A self without mirrors. A breath without count. A moment that doesn’t ask to be saved, only lived.
So let it go. Let it carry you. Let it remake you.
life 
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