The notebook · September 3, 2026

The reason I invent

There are mornings when I wake up anxious before having any reason to be. It is not a thought, it is a state: the middle of the body tight, and a hurry with nowhere to go.

What I do next is very regular, and I had never looked at it straight. I take inventory. Work first, because it is the best stocked shelf. Then money. Then the people I love, one by one, in an order that never changes. Then my health, which I consult the way you knock on a partition wall.

I stop when a shelf answers. Not when it shouts: when it answers just enough to be plausible. And then I am relieved, which is the strangest part of the whole business. I have a reason. A reason can be prayed for.

So I pray for that, and I pray very well for that. The right words, a clear request, a handing over. I am praying about a file that was not open when I woke up.

What unsettles me is not that I have the subject wrong. It is the order of things. The relief arrives when I find the reason, not when I pray. The prayer comes afterwards, like the fair copy of something settled elsewhere, and settled by me.

Psalm 42 asks my question and does not do the same thing with it.

Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God. For I shall still praise him for the saving help of his presence.

Psalm 42:5 (World English Bible)

It asks twice, and it answers neither time. Not one line of explanation, not there and not later. The next sentence leaves for somewhere else, towards a hope that plainly did not wait for an answer. I do not move on to the next sentence. I stay inside the why until I have brought something back out of it.

There is a line in Pascal’s Pensées that does not look for its cause, and I find it more honest than what I manufacture in the morning.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Nobody has ever managed to put that on a list of intentions. It is not a worry, there is no outcome to ask for, and the sentence does not apologise for existing.

I tried, yesterday, not to take inventory. I sat still and said what I could see: the chest, the breath, the hour. It did not last long, and I heard myself finish with “it must be next week’s appointment”, the way you close a door to stop feeling the draught. I do not know whether that was a prayer or an escape.

I note only this, and it is enough for today: I am very good at taking inventory, and I do not know how to stay in front of something that has no name.

In Manna, tomorrow’s prayer will not ask me why.