A Quiet Fourth of July

At some point, we realize that life is no longer unfolding so much as repeating. This is perfectly normal. You see it most clearly in the small rituals that carry on regardless of how you feel about them. Mine is an oddly harmonious symmetry of waking up at roughly the same hour and moving, with practiced efficiency, into the day.

I wake up. I work. I speak to familiar faces without quite seeing them. I come home. I sleep, if my mind allows it. Then I do it again. Time passes quietly, without novelty or explanation, doing its job without asking for commentary.

This doesn’t feel like despair.

It feels like maintenance.

What changes first is what I want. Intensity loses its appeal. Chaos stops feeling meaningful. Novelty begins to register as effort rather than excitement. Peace becomes attractive. Silence too. A good night’s sleep starts to feel less like laziness and more like a small, necessary mercy.

I am tired.

Not dramatically tired, just worn down by accumulation. Too many voices. Too much information. Too many moments that ask for attention without offering anything back.

Work changes around the same time. It stops functioning as proof of worth and becomes exactly what it is. Work. Something we do, not something we are. Something that continues whether we are excellent or merely present.

For a long time, I hid inside being busy. I believed motion implied direction, that sustained effort would eventually justify itself. My mind resisted stillness. It demanded problems, stimulation, noise. I’m not entirely sure when that stopped, only that it did, quietly, without asking permission.

What I am slowly learning is that there is nothing profound waiting underneath all this activity. No final answer. No moment where everything aligns and explains itself.

There is just contentment.

And contentment is unsettling. It does not reward urgency. It does not negotiate with worry. It asks whether we are willing to accept that life keeps going, even when it is stripped of spectacle.

I am learning that failure is normal. That exhaustion is not weakness. That repetition is not always a trap; sometimes it is the shape life takes when it continues without interruption.

Maybe this is what growing older looks like.

Not the loss of intensity, but the understanding that things can go on without us constantly intervening.

Nothing is broken.

Nothing is ending.

Things are simply continuing, quietly...

Maybe this is enough...For now...