On Viscosity

Recall now that low, creeping fatigue
that arrives without cause.
Yet something settles between your shoulder blades — not weight, but waiting.
Fatigue becomes the backdrop, the thick air you choke on.
It lingers behind you, painting your day in shades of grey.
You wish to shake it off, yet cannot grasp it.

You wade through heavy snow,
thigh-deep, calf-deep, still standing.
You call out. No echo returns.
Did you truly speak? Are you even moving forward?

Now you label it a crisis.
Or: “I am stuck. O God, I must change something!”
The illusion that to name a problem is to understand it.
To understand, you assume, is to solve it, and so you rush — into therapy, into new relationships, into new pursuits.
“I will reinvent myself in this new setting!”

Is this viscosity in the content, you, the operator?
Or — in the structure?!

You change the water, yet swim the same stroke.
See: you carry it all with you.
Not as a burden, but as a vow: “I see, and I do not look away!”
Still insufficient to cease the struggle, yet enough to remember: something remains unresolved.

Viscosity —
a wandering that mistakes itself for motion.
You take a step. It appears to be progress.
Yet your position within your own inner space remains unchanged.
Awareness changes nothing.
Every moment echoes the one before.

Different steps.
Same result.
You continue to accumulate,
yet nothing leaves a trace.

You eat. You sleep. You run.
All becomes automatic.
The viscosity fades from sensation.
You cease to feel altogether.

Something stirs, something builds — all within the same horizontal plane.
Travelling inside a plane that leads nowhere.

Fear propels you forward.
You remain passive.
You do not dread the leap.
Yet the leap does not arrive.

It is not “I resist change,” but “change simply does not occur.”
Viscosity is the absence of resistance, which is worse than resistance itself.
In resistance, there would be a point of leverage.
You remain suspended.
Drowning in something that lacks depth.

The process continues.
You fail to notice your own movement.
You fall asleep. You wake. Again you sleep.
Between lies only static.
Neither living nor dying.

Why do you not depart?
Perhaps you perceive no clear direction.
Yet leaving remains horizontal wandering,
and viscosity resides within it — indefinitely.

Not stuck in a place.
Stuck in a manner.
Where does your attention rest?
Still in argument with what unfolds.
No breakthrough occurs.
Nor have you been driven to total oblivion.
The intermediate state — is the most painful.
And there is no exit.
For that would merely be escape.

But viscosity is not a problem.
It is a structure.
You see yourself running in circles.
The “solution” remains part of the circle.
Even seeing becomes a circle,
if it halts at “I see.”

You are not in viscosity.
You are viscosity.
And it is you.
Movement along a spiral that appears circular.
Appears. It is not.
Dense. Slow.

If you look long enough — generating the tension of presence —
you may finally leap from every condition that still holds you captive:
the fear of death,
the loss of meaning.
And then —
breakthrough.
Or not.