The notebook · August 26, 2026

With none of me in it

At the end of the decade, I speed up. I have always known it and I put it down to tiredness, or to wanting to be done with the five.

That is not it. This week I listened to myself, and I saw where my voice slows. It slows on the ten Hail Marys, because there is someone in them I am praying for and I nearly always have a name in mind. It slows on the Our Father, where there are requests, and some of them concern me a great deal. Then comes the line where there is nothing to obtain, and it picks up speed on its own.

Which is to say: I go fast in exactly the place where I have nothing to gain. It is not flattering, but it is clear.

One evening I tried saying it alone, with no decade around it, and adding nothing after. The text is very short. The silence behind it is not.

And I found out what I was doing in that silence. I was waiting for my turn. Not for God, not for an answer. My turn to speak again, to get back to what I had come for. Praise, in my mouth, has the shape of a courtesy you pay before asking.

I could settle with that. Say it is already something to have noticed, that praise is learned, that it will come. Perhaps. But what I can actually see is more stupid than that. The one time I said this prayer without hurrying, it was an evening when I no longer had the strength to want anything. Nothing spiritual in it. The wanting had stopped, and the sentence finally had room.

That bothers me, because I do not know how to manufacture that state, and I am not sure I want to call it grace.

So I am changing almost nothing. I am keeping the line where it is, at the end, and only trying to stop putting anything after it. Tonight I did not manage: I went straight on to a name, very fast, before I had finished the word Amen. I will try again tomorrow. It is not much, being quiet afterwards.

In Manna tomorrow, a prayer I will have nothing to negotiate.