The Most Certain Thing Notice it now, before the thought finishes forming: something is already slipping past. The light has moved a finger's width across the floor since you sat down. A sound has begun and ended. The breath you were taking is gone, replaced by the next. None of this requires belief. It arrives without being asked — the most ordinary fact of being awake, that we are not standing still in our lives but moving through them, carried, as if downstream. We speak o