One More Round Until Four

Koa has worked out the exact mechanism and knowing it has not helped even slightly.

Here is how it goes. The round ends. There is about a second and a half where a man could stand up. And inside that second and a half the next thing is already on the screen: the count for the next one starting, a small number going up somewhere, three words from somebody on his team, a thing he has nearly finished which will finish in about eleven minutes.

There is never a gap. That is the whole design, and it is not an accident, and he does not resent it exactly, because he understands that people built it on purpose and were paid to.

But it means there is no place to stand up.

It is ten past four. He has work at seven. He is twenty-nine and he has been doing some version of this since he was fifteen and it has never once been the biggest problem in his life, which is precisely why nothing has ever been done about it.

And here is what has changed, and it is not a catastrophe. He would almost prefer a catastrophe.

His body has started to feel like a borrowed thing.

He gets through the day. He is good at his job. And there is a specific dull quality to everything now, a sort of underwater feeling, and he noticed it hardest three weeks ago at his nephew's birthday in the afternoon, standing in a yard in the sun with people he loves, feeling almost nothing at all.

I am not sad and I am not in trouble. I am just not really here, and it has been years, and the thing never gives me a place to stop.

And here is where I stop talking about Koa, because yours does the same thing, and you know the second and a half, and you have never once been handed a gap.

Let me name the wound before I do anything with it, because it will not heal covered and nobody says it plainly to people in your position: what you are up against is not weakness of will. It is design. Rooms of intelligent people worked out how to remove the gap, and you have been fighting that alone at four in the morning with nothing but yourself, and losing, and calling the losing a character flaw.

He is the one who makes you lie down

Let me put the true thing down first, at ten past four, because it goes straight at the thing you have not got.

You have not been able to find a stopping place, and that is real. But the stopping was never something you were meant to generate out of nothing, and there is a verse about that which almost everybody has heard and almost nobody has read properly: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures: He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.Psalm 23:2-3

Sit with the verb, because it is the whole point and it is a little startling once you see it.

He makes me to lie down. Not He suggests it. Not He provides an environment in which lying down would be advisable. The Shepherd is the active party, and the sheep does not decide to rest; a shepherd who knows the flock brings it to a place where lying down happens.

And then: He restores my soul. Restoring is what you do to a thing that has been worn down, and it is done by somebody else, and the underwater feeling you had in that yard is exactly what a worn down soul feels like from the inside.

So the gap you cannot find is something a Shepherd makes rather than something you manufacture, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own advice, and God's Spirit is not in this room at four in the morning disappointed in your discipline.

A design, met with a design

Now let me be practical, because you are a practical man and a purely spiritual answer will not survive tomorrow night.

The thing has no gap, so a gap has to come from outside it. That is not defeat, it is the correct response to what it actually is: you do not out-will a design, you meet it with one.

And the design does not have to be clever. It has to exist before the second and a half arrives, because the second and a half is not a moment for deciding anything, and every plan that depends on deciding inside it has already failed.

A drawer in another room. A charger that is not by the bed. A friend who plays with you and has agreed with you, in daylight, on a time. A hard stop set on the machine itself by somebody who is not you at eleven at night.

None of that is a moral achievement and none of it is meant to be. It is a man making a gap, on purpose, in the afternoon, for a version of himself who will not be able to make one at four.

Hear this: your attention belongs to you and your body is not borrowed, and God is not asking you to win a fight He never designed you to have alone. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can build tomorrow rather than a thing you resolve tonight.

And the plain half, because a message without it has failed you. If the nights have gone and the days feel underwater, tell a doctor, plainly: I sleep four hours, I have for years, and I feel nothing at things I should feel something at. That is a medical description and it matters, and the flatness may not only be tiredness. A counselor is not an overreaction for something that has taken fourteen years of nights. And tell one person in daylight, because this is entirely invisible and it runs on that.