Every Target, No Exceptions

December seventh. I keep returning to a specific order of events: the body moves, then the mind notices, then, much later, you write about it. The aerial silks class I dropped into in November was one of those. I went once on an impulse. Then I went back. And at some point between the first session and this one, something shifted without me formally deciding it had.

The thing I had been quietly working toward, not out loud, not even really in this space until now, was finishing a full session without pausing at the approach to a hold and talking myself out of it. That sounds minor. It was not minor. The pause was never about strength. It was about the fraction of a second where you calculate whether you are the kind of person who does the next thing. I have been working on that fraction. This session, I did not find it. I just did the next thing each time, and the session ended, and I was standing at the base of the silk with one hand still resting on it and nothing left to negotiate.

Still thinking about the ceiling.

I pulled my socks on near the entrance bench and sat there for a moment with the rigging visible in the background and thought: the impulsive self was right again. She keeps being right. I have a longer history with this feeling than I sometimes remember, the borrowed climbing shoes, the solo winter skills session, the sketchbook reached for without planning. The body moves first. The mind writes about it two weeks later on a Monday morning in December. That seems about right.

The after-part. Which is also a part.

The sketchbook is still sitting on the counter. The coworker's question is still sitting somewhere between Simone and me, unasked in my direction, unanswered in any direction. Gerald put out another leaf last week. The windowsill is doing what it does in December light. I keep thinking the cleared counter makes you notice the room, and maybe that is what this year has been, a slow noticing of a room I have been standing in for a while. Not arrival. Just attention finally landing where it was always going to land.