A man works 12 hours,
And his wife 12 hours.
And at the end of the day,
They pass each other like co-workers in a building neither of them owns.
He says,
I don't see her enough.
This much is true,
And he says it plainly,
The way a man reports a fact of weather.
Ask him if he has a practice.
Some fixed point in the day where he stops and looks at his own mind and he will scoff.
In what time?
As if this were the honest answer of a poor man.
But he is not poor.
He has more than he will spend in the years he has left.
And still.
The 12 hours continue.
Look at what else has been pushed to the same place as his wife.
His own body,
Likely.
Whatever care it needs.
Deferred the way a marriage is deferred.
His rest.
Whatever he once did that had no purpose,
Except that he loved it.
These do not announce themselves as losses the way a marriage does.
Because no one is standing in the doorway of the gym.
Or the garden,
Or the quiet hour reminding him that it's empty.
A wife can say that you're never here.
The rest of what he's abandoned says nothing.
It just goes quietly,
And he never notices it's gone because there was never a face attached to the missing of it.
This is worth seeing clearly.
It is not really his wife that got pushed off.
It is everything without an urgent voice.
The work has an urgent voice.
Emails.
Calls.
The next thing due today.
Her voice is urgent too when she speaks.
But his own care of himself has no voice at all.
It only has a knowing.
Quiet and easily outrun.
And knowing without a voice always loses to noise.
So it is not that he chose work over his wife or work over himself.
He chose whatever spoke loudest,
Every day,
For years,
And everything silent,
His health,
His rest,
His marriage and quieter moments,
The parts of himself he no longer visits,
Was left to keep without a sound.
Notice what the sentence,
I don't see her enough,
Does and does not say.
It names an absence of hours.
It does not name what the absence has become inside him.
And it does not name the other,
Quieter absences standing just behind it.
Perhaps he isn't sleeping enough either.
Or hasn't seen a doctor in years.
Or long ago dropped the last thing that was his alone.
He speaks of one.
He carries all of them.
Why does he flinch when the practice is suggested?
Not because any one thing he is not named.
He flinches because the question presses towards all of it at once.
Toward everything he has been outrunning by staying busy.
Do you have a practice?
Means,
Are you willing to sit still with yourself?
And to sit still is to let silent things finally speak.
So he answers with a schedule instead.
In what time?
Because the schedule is safe ground and the silence is not.
Do not think the flinch is stupidity.
It is the mind.
Keeping its distance from what it isn't ready to hear.
And mistaking the keeping of distance for a plain statement of fact.
This is worth remembering the next time your own voice describes your life in terms of hours,
Or logistics,
Or things there simply isn't time for.
He does not need someone to ask him better questions.
He needs a practice small enough that the flinch cannot stop it.
A moment returned to daily.
Where he simply attends to what has gone quiet in his life.
Without yet trying to fix it.
Not his wife alone.
But himself as a whole.
Body,
Rest,
The parts of him with no urgent voice.
Just this,
Noticing what has been pushed off,
And that is still there,
Waiting,
Patient,
In the way only neglected things are patient.
And it is here.
In the repetition.
That the shift happens.
Not in the moment he finally attends to what's been abandoned.
But in the many moments before it.
When he starts to hear the silence as something he made rather than something that simply happened to him.
This is what changes his relation to himself.
Not new information.
But a new distance from his own habits,
Small enough to stand in and look back.
That distance is the leverage.
Without it.
Whatever he discovers has nowhere to be placed.
With it,
He can finally give a voice to what had never had one.
And begin.
One silent thing at a time to answer it.
Never mind.
Everything is inside.
