The notebook · August 25, 2026

The other conversation

Second decade, roughly. My fingers are moving, my mouth is saying the words, and I notice that I am explaining something to a person who is not in the room. In full sentences. With a tone of voice.

For a long time I treated this as a fault. You bring the attention back, you start the decade again, you promise better. The attention returns, holds for three beads, and leaves. At some point I stopped fighting it, not out of wisdom, out of tiredness.

What I noticed once I stopped fighting is that these are not random people. It is always the same ones. Four or five, and nearly always in the same order. I could name them without hesitating, which is more than I can say for my list.

Because I have a list too, a real one, the one I read back when I don’t know what to ask for. There are sick people on it, people far away, situations that weigh. A very well kept list. And the four or five who come up during the decades are not on it. They are the people I have something unfinished with.

I would like to draw a nice sentence out of that. Something like: distraction is already prayer, the ones who come are the ones God is handing me. It would suit me very well. But it isn’t true, or not yet. In those conversations I am not asking anything for them. I am pleading, I am polishing, and sometimes I win. That is not intercession. It is a dress rehearsal.

So one evening I tried letting them in properly. Naming them out loud, one to a bead, like the others. Two went through very simply, and the ease of it surprised me. The third did not. I heard myself begin and stop, because the truth is that I did not want anything good for him. I wanted to be right. It passed for what it was. I did not push.

So I don’t know what to call these people. Arrivals, or interruptions. What I can see is that I do not choose them, and that my list, the one I do choose, shows me in a better light.

Tonight I pick up where my hand happens to be, and I look at who turns up.

In Manna tomorrow, a prayer I will not have to steer.