The ten minutes you cannot remember

And then you notice ten minutes have gone by and you cannot account for a single one of them.

This happens more than you would admit if someone asked. You drive somewhere and arrive without remembering the road.

It is not memory loss, and it is not exhaustion in the way you usually mean it. It is something quieter: a kind of leaving, where your hands keep working and the rest of you steps out of the room.

You would not call it unhappiness. It does not announce itself that way.

It shows up as time you cannot locate. An evening gone, a task finished, and no memory of actually being present for any of it.

This is worth pausing on, because it is not the same as being busy. Being busy, you remember.

You remember the rush, the deadline, the burned dinner. This is something else, done without residue.

This is different. This is doing life without quite living it, the way you might read a page and reach the bottom having absorbed nothing.

Nobody warns you this can happen to your own life. That you can be present enough to function and absent enough to lose whole stretches of it.

The good news, if there is good news, is that noticing it at all is the first crack in the pattern. You cannot come back to yourself if you never realize you left.

So this week, we start there. Not with a big return, just with catching the moments you drift, and gently, without judgment, coming back.

Carry this into your week: you do not need to fix the drifting. You just need to notice when it happens, and that noticing is already you, coming back.

You do not have to change it, just clock it when it happens.

Where was I, really, the last time I could not remember doing something ordinary?

Tomorrow, a small way to catch yourself mid-drift and pull yourself gently back into the room.

See you tomorrow.