Day 116: Embalming Time
For Uncertainty
So, I’ve finished the 100 days.
Or maybe it’s better to say the 100 days have finished me into something a little softer, a little more awake. I will not be posting every day anymore, but I will keep sharing, because the world keeps offering itself, and I am still learning to pay attention.
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The messages so many of you have sent, during the project and after, completely stunned me. Notes from friends, strangers, people I have not seen in years. Little sparks of recognition. People saying they needed a reminder to look up, to slow down, to see the way light cuts across a street or a face or a moment. Sometimes we just need someone else to point and whisper: look.
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This week I had another hospital appointment. Another specialist. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I mattered. Like someone was taking me seriously.
And then he told me that whatever this is, benign or not, it is not good. The mass sits inside a space in my skull. We only see it clearly when I turn my head, because it is that big, but it is nested in the gap.
In the in between. In the place where something should not be. Ironic that it being in the in-between, is just like me.
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Janet told me she is with me in soul, in hope, in uncertainty. Because we are all living in uncertainty. I guess it is how we feel it that changes us. How we hold it. How we let it move through us without letting it take everything.
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Roland Barthes wrote that the photograph says:
This has been. A photograph is a wound in time. A trace left by the world itself. A mark carved by light. Not metaphor but a literal certification of presence. The world touching film. Time embalmed.
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Maybe that is why I kept taking these tiny daily images. Maybe that is why I wrote the way I did.
It was my attempt to embalm time. To hold it still for a second. To say: I was here. This happened. This mattered. Even when I was afraid. Even when I was uncertain. Even when something inside my skull was quietly rewriting the script of my days.
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Embalming time is not about freezing life. It is about honouring it. It is about capturing the fleeting, the fragile, the almost invisible. It is about refusing to let the days disappear into the blur that the status quo keeps asking of us.
It is a way of fighting the pull of numbness. A way of refusing the soft erasure that happens when we stop noticing.
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Because every day gives us something.
A fragment. A colour. A coincidence. A softness.
A trace.
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And the strange thing is: when you start noticing, the world notices you back.
It widens. It warms. It gives you more.
And people, kind and brilliant and surprising, reach out and say:
I see it too.
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Thank you for reminding me.
So thank you, truly, for reading, for sending words, for sharing your own traces.
For letting me know that the practice of seeing still matters, especially in times like these.
I will keep posting, just not every day.
But I will keep looking.
I hope you will too.
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After all, everything we touch becomes a small act of preservation.
A way of embalming time on the way to whatever comes next.
