The notebook · September 4, 2026

Make it stop

Last night I did something I had never done. I read my list of intentions, not to pray it, but to look at it. Line by line, the way you reread a letter you wrote too quickly.

There are names, and next to the names, what I am asking for them. And I counted. Of the lines from these last months, nearly all of them start the same way. That the pain would ease. That this whole business would be over. That the tension would drop. That I would stop being like this with her. Four lines in five say what I want gone.

It had never struck me, because that is the most natural way to speak of what weighs. What weighs is what you talk about first.

But I think now there is something else in it, and it is less pretty. A request in the negative cannot be refused cleanly. If I ask that the pain would ease, there will always be a day that is slightly less bad, and I will be able to call that an answer. If I ask for one thing, one only, out in the open, then it can be refused exactly. I have arranged never to put a question whose answer could be no.

I tried rewriting three of them in the positive. The first came on its own and it shook me a little, because it was far simpler than its negative version, and far shorter. The other two would not come. I circled, I found phrasings, and every time I could hear myself cheating: I was saying what it would be decent to want, not what I want.

There is somebody in Psalm 27 who does not have this problem. The verse opens: “One thing I have asked of the Lord, that I will seek after”. One thing, counted before it is even named, and then he names it, and it is enormous. I read that and I cannot tell whether I admire the nerve or the clarity. Perhaps they are the same thing.

This morning the list is still there, four fifths of it in retreat. I did not have the courage to rewrite the whole thing. I left the line that held at the top, on its own, and I will see tonight whether I say it.

In Manna, the prayer of the day often asks for something I would not have thought to ask for.