Zen and the Art of Rambling
Begin again, they say — but what if the beginning is the question? This piece drifts through recursive introspection, where writing becomes both compass and confession. It’s a therapeutic sketch of paradoxes, poetic hesitations, and the quiet philosophy of not knowing, yet still choosing to speak.
What is a start? Writing is like living in retrospect. Normally you think a thought, and then you think another. With writing, you think, then you stop while you note it down. Its like applying a brake.
Retrospect. So you can look back at some later time, and have proof of a thought you interrupted. Some therapeutic value is expected. Revisiting advertises patterns to learn from. We hope.
But the start is rarely singular. It’s a flicker of intention, followed by a pause, then a detour. Writing doesn’t begin cleanly; it accumulates. Each sentence is a sediment of previous hesitations, a layered echo of what might have been said if the moment hadn’t fractured into language. The act of starting is less about ignition and more about surrender — to the rhythm of interruption, to the shape of a thought that resists being held.
Sometimes I wonder if starting is just a ritual of framing absence. You write not to capture presence, but to mark where something almost was. The blank page isn’t empty; it’s rehearsing silence. And each word is a small betrayal of that silence — a gesture that says, “I was here, briefly, thinking.” So the start becomes a kind of memorial, not of clarity, but of the attempt.
I prefer the big picture to the detail. I never complete the big picture, so I miss the detail. What is a start?
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.
This piece is a quiet meditation on the nature of beginnings, thought, and the paradox of writing-as-interruption. It’s reflective, recursive, and gently unresolved — a philosophical sketch that circles its own question without trying to answer it. The final line lands like a whisper: “What is a start?” — not rhetorical, but genuinely wondering.