Many Strange and a Lot of Wonderful Things

There are days when nothing happens...

Thought about making this one paid… but just couldn’t find the heart to do it… I will deliver something special for my long-and-truly-faithful paid subs soon. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to you all. You don’t realise how much motivation you give me to keep going! Thank you! Thank You! THANK YOU!

Thomas Alexander Harrison - Solitude

There are days when nothing happens, and days when nothing happens so intensely, so dramatically that it becomes a kind of event.

You wake up and the light is wrong. Not unbelivably wrong: no doomsday-yellow, no ash skulking in the air, but wrong in the way a room feels when they, that forever-stranger, has just left it. The light is thinner than yesterday. Or thicker. You can’t quite tell. You look. You listen. The kettle clicks off too early. The bread tastes like memory. Something is off, but it isn’t bad. It’s just… noticeable, vague and vaguely ———.

This is usually how the strange begins.

Not with revelations or the angel’s voices or the parental booming from the clouds, but with the sense that the world has quietly adjusted itself while you weren’t looking. Like furniture rearranged by a polite ghost. Here, sir. You still know where everything is, technically, but you keep reaching slightly to the left of where things now are.

I think we’ve been misled about wonder. We expect it to announce itself. Fireworks. Psychedelics. Transcendence with a capital T. But most wonder is very small. It hides in places that look unimportant: where fear of the mundane makes us trembles to tread. It disguises itself as inconvenience. It waits until you’re tired.

Take, for example, the fact that your hands are not symmetrical. You can place them palm to palm and they almost match, but not quite. One thumb bends differently. One nail grows faster. One finger is more wrinkly than all the rest. One hand feels more yours. This is not useful information. There is no improvement to your life here. But once you notice it, it’s hard to forget that you are not a clean object. You are a compromise, a dare from the universe to itself.

Or consider this: there are smells you will never smell again. Entire constellations of scents: classrooms, buses, certain stairwells, someone else’s coat (so long sweet love), that existed once and then vanished without ceremony. You didn’t mark their passing. No one told you it was the last time. The universe did not pause to let you take it in. It just moved on, dragging that smell with it, leaving you with nothing but a vague ache and the knowledge that you cannot go back.

This happens constantly.

Every second, something ordinary is becoming irretrievable.

This should be horrifying. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s quietly beautiful, like watching dust settle in a beam of light you know will shift in a moment anyway. The dust doesn’t care. The light doesn’t care. And yet, there they are, collaborating briefly on a tiny, perfect event that will never repeat in exactly the same way. The event is the real.

People often say they want meaning, but what they usually mean is reassurance. Meaning without reassurance is much harder to tolerate. Meaning that doesn’t tell you you’re special, or chosen, or on the right path. Meaning that simply says: this is happening, and it is strange that it is happening at all.

You are on a rock, hurtling through space, made of dead stars, paying bills, refreshing your phone, occasionally remembering that you will die. This is not a metaphor. This is not poetic language. This is literally the situation.

And yet (here’s the strange part) you still care whether a song comes on at the right moment. You still feel a small thrill when a joke lands. You still notice when someone laughs in a way that surprises themselves. You still experience a faint, irrational pleasure when you align two objects neatly, or when a sentence ends exactly where it should.

Why?

No grand system explains this satisfactorily. Philosophy tries. Religion tries. Your mum tries. Your dad. Neuroscience shrugs and gestures vaguely at dopamine. None of them quite capture the fact that sometimes you look at a leaf (just a leaf, doing leaf things,leafing around, leafing in the wind, a lightsome underbelly against the dark paw of the earth, then vanish) and feel, very briefly, that the universe has done something kind by allowing this configuration of matter to exist.

It’s embarrassing to admit. It feels naive. But it just keeps happening.

The wonderful does not arrive as a revelation. It arrives as a flicker. A pause. The susurration of a breath. A moment where the churning machinery of the world seems to hesitate, as if it too is unsure why it’s bothering, and then carries on anyway.

You can miss these moments very easily. In fact, most of the systems we live inside are designed to make sure you do. Speed helps. Noise helps. Urgency helps. The blinding screen helps. News helps. That calm overpowering sense of dread helps. If you are always on your way to something else, the strange never quite has time to form.

But occasionally, despite everything, it slips through.

A mispronounced word that sounds strangely better than the correct one.
A cracked screen that refracts light into an accidental rainbow.
The way a child explains something incorrectly but more truthfully.
The uncanny fact that you are inside your head and cannot step out to check it.

These are not answers. They are not meant for understanding. They are not lessons. They are not content. They do not improve your productivity or optimize your life. They do not scale. Nothing remains but silence.

They are simply small, odd permissions to feel that existence is not entirely exhausted by explanation.

And that, for now, is enough to begin. To begin again. All over.

The trouble is that once you notice the strange, you also start noticing how quickly it rots.

For nothing stays wondrous for very long. The leaf dries out. The dust settles somewhere else. A beloved voice becomes a voicemail you can’t bring yourself to delete. The song you once loved becomes background noise in a supermarket, then an advert, then a memory you can no longer access without wincing. A sentence that once cracked you open becomes a quote under someone’s selfie. The star of the fabled-land collapses in silence and nobody looks up. Wonder has a half-life, and it is aggressively short. So soon dream of, becomes the dream of once was.

Time does not pass politely and it does not announce transitions, nor does it divide itself into meaningful chapters. It just keeps going, like a conveyor belt that forgot what it was supposed to be carrying. You look up one day and realise that something you assumed would always be there (your parents’ voices, your knees, your patience, your capacity to be surprised) has quietly degraded. Not catastrophically. Just enough to matter.

Decay is rarely cinematic. It is administrative. It looks like paperwork. It looks like repeated minor disappointments. It looks like opening the same app for the thousandth time, knowing exactly what you’ll find there, and doing it anyway. It looks like tiny disappointments wearing tiny hats. It looks like your phone going “again?” and you going “yes. yes. yes.” It looks like your body running on autopilot while you stare into the middle distance like a decorative plant. It looks like the body continuing to function long after the enthusiasm for functioning has gone.

There is a popular fantasy that if we just understood time better, if we could map it and break it down into more manageable units, it would stop hurting. This is false. Time is not confused about what it’s doing. It is doing exactly what it was always going to do. The confusion is ours.

You feel this most clearly when you try to remember something precisely. You can’t. You have to understand: memory is not a recording; it’s a reconstruction performed by a nervous animal under pressure. Each time you revisit the past, you slightly damage it, like handling an old photograph with dampish hands. Eventually, all that remains is the knowledge that something mattered, without being able to say exactly why. This is how whole lives disappear. This is how I once vanished, to appear again only as the evil goblin in your inbox…

The absurd part is that, despite knowing this, you still plan. You still say things like “next year” and “soon” and “eventually” and “monday” and “when things settle down.” You behave as if time were a resource you could manage, a series of drawers you could label and organise, talking about “making the most of it,” as if it were not actively dissolving while you speak. Even despair has to fit into a schedule. Ha!

Sometimes people say that what makes life meaningful is that it ends. (Heidegger? Kierkegaard? Jesus? The world’s last milkman?) This is one of those statements that sounds profound until you sit with it for more than five seconds. Yes, finitude sharpens things, but (I’ll have you remember) it also erases them. The ending doesn’t crown the story; it interrupts it mid-sentence. Most lives don’t conclude. They trail off. You don’t get closure. You get tired.

And yet (and this is the part that’s hardest to explain, and hardest to justfy) none of this quite cancels out the strange. The decay does not invalidate the wonder. If anything, it gives it teeth: vicious tigerteeth!

The absurdity isn’t that things end. The absurdity is that, knowing they will, you still care. That you still notice. That you still sometimes feel the faint pull of attention snag on something useless and fragile and transient, like a reflection in a puddle you’re about to step in. (Wet socks and all…)

There is no system that will redeem this - no cosmic ledger balancing loss against beauty and no final explanation waiting at the end of the corridor. If there were, it would cheapen the whole thing. It would turn experience into a lesson, and lessons are for classrooms and naughty students, not for existence.

What you get instead is this: a sequence of moments, most of them unremarkable, some of them quietly unbearable, and a few, just a fair few that resist being flattened into nothing.

A glance that lingers half a second too long. A laugh, silver, sudden, caught midair like a tossed coin before it decides. A sentence that ends better than you expected. A misheard word that turns, like a key, and opens a secret door in the day. A beetle’s lacquered back rolling its tiny universe of light as it hurries, important, nowhere. The fact that you are still here, noticing anything at all.

This is not hope, not hope… exactly. It is closer to a stubbornness. Or tired longing. Or an inertia. Or rather, if I were to put it as best i possibly can, a mild but persistent refusal to accept that everything is already over.

Time will continue to wear you down. You body will falter and your mind will loop. The world will not improve in the ways you were promised. How could it? None of this is a secret. None of this is new.

And still, absurdly, something flickers. Not enough to save you. Not enough to explain anything. Just enough to keep you looking.

Which, under the circumstances, is surprising.

And maybe, quietly, stubbornly, its a lot of strange things, and a lot of wonderful ones too.

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