There was a time when certain things would take hold immediately, before there was even a chance to notice it happening. A word, a tone, a shift in someone’s behaviour, and the response would already be in motion, familiar, practised, almost expected. It didn’t feel chosen. It moved too quickly for that, and by the time it was noticed, it was already shaping what followed.

Over time, something begins to change, not in a dramatic or deliberate way, but in the way a gap appears where there wasn’t one before. The same situations arise, the same words are spoken, but the response doesn’t land in the same way. It doesn’t take hold with the same certainty.

What once showed up in the body as heat, as pressure, as a rising that needed somewhere to go, begins to shift. Sometimes it is nothing more than a gentle in-breath where there would have once been reaction. Alongside that, the need to follow it, to build it into something, to make sense of it or justify it, begins to loosen. What once gathered quickly and carried you with it no longer forms in the same way.

There is a moment, sometimes only a fraction of a second, where it can be seen forming rather than simply lived. It is subtle, easy to miss, but once noticed, it doesn’t entirely disappear again.

The reaction may still come, but it no longer arrives with the same authority. It passes more lightly, less fixed, less convincing in its insistence that it is necessary.

Nothing has been removed and nothing has been resolved. The situations themselves may not have changed at all, but something in the way they are met has.

There is less urgency to respond, less need to follow the familiar path to where it has always led. What once felt immediate begins to feel optional, not as control, but because it no longer defines the moment in the same way.

It doesn’t happen all at once, and it may not stay consistent.

But once it begins, even quietly, it changes the way things move.

— Saint Parousia