A single day can feel like a fracture in time, where everything noisy falls away just long enough to reveal what has been speaking all along.
. . .
Today is a one-off. A singularity. I am a singularity, you think, the one and only me.
The noise comes from every direction. Another war, outbreak, crash, depression, or market correction; a distortion, inversion, fabrication, or manufactured crisis of the week. You’ve built up a tolerance for the world-stage spectacle and can, for the most part, set it aside. But the worst of it resides within you. There’s no escaping that.
It isn’t the still, small voice of truth. It’s the antagonist, your lifelong partner in strife, your subconscious noisemaker that too often takes center stage. That son of a bitch is relentless. The more you know, the more you see, the more you comprehend about the nature of this reality, the closer you come to something real, the louder it gets.
As if that’s possible. As if that’s real. What does it matter? Why bother trying? If that’s true, what’s the point? On and on it goes, testing your discoveries, throwing shade at your efforts toward discernment and intuition, probing the strength of your resolve.
We try to drill down, to get past the noise and find something solid to stand on. Along the way we encounter the usual suspects: misguided parenting, inexperienced or absent mentors, flawed teachers and models; environments that breed angst, division, and infighting. Impositions pile on from the unfolding world script; controlled narratives, indoctrination, and the many subtle ways we are steered off course.
The seeds are planted, but the soil is toxic.
Still, we discover. We uproot, contend, reconcile, and recapitulate across the arc of a life. Regrets, we have a few. Resentments, we have plenty. Perhaps ritual, religion, or some other apparatus offers an escape, a way to cope, to hide, to suppress the pain. Forgiveness! That’s what’s missing. But the savior complex never satisfies. We know it’s a lie. And yet, through that whole episode, we edge closer to something real.
What is the most important thing I can do today? How do I begin without falling back into routine, boredom, or that familiar emptiness? There’s a growing list of shoulds now, endless to-do lists that spark brief surges of energy. But the center doesn’t hold.
The formula may be perfect, in a way, but the variables were never ours.
All this time, chasing someone else’s reasons, logic, plans, and programs, trying to make them fit, and wondering why apathy and discontent return so easily. Still, we’re a step closer.
Bills, loan payments, appointments, responsibilities. Eat the right foods at the right times. Move the body in the right ways. Use it or lose it. Why is everything so expensive? Will it ever get easier? Who could love this fragile, unsteady, uncertain version of me?
Again, we reach a tipping point. It’s too much. We ask, again and again: what will give me a reason to rise in the morning with energy, with anticipation? After another broken sleep. After a few hours of strange, vivid dreams.
They died years ago, and yet there they were, alive again. Younger, perhaps. Visiting in some ethereal moment of bewilderment. I could have done more while they were still here, you think. The guilt lingers. Or maybe it’s shame. Another thread to pull during a so-called “shadow work” session, as if there weren’t already enough.
Then it passes. As it always does.
I am who I am, and I’m not broken, you think.
And it’s true. You’re not lacking. Not behind. Not late to anything. Not missing some essential piece in all this seeking, toiling, walking, and reintegrating. You’re not lost in the woods or buried in the weeds. You’re not failing at life.
Something quiet returns, a subtle lift in confidence, a remembrance beyond the noise of the mind. It cuts cleanly through what, moments ago, felt so very fucking important.
You find your breath again.
And another.
We’re not here for long. Every signal, symptom, circumstance, and eventuality is for you. It’s yours alone. No one else can know what a day in your body feels like, how the world appears through your eyes, or what your heart truly longs for.
You can’t borrow what is authentic. You can only live it.
Solvitur ambulando
Written by Trance Blackman. Originally published on tranceblackman.com on 23 March 2026.