Author’s Note:
This piece follows an earlier meditation on time as motion—planetary, seasonal, indifferent to witness. Here, the scale narrows. What was once orbit becomes pulse; what turned without us now turns within us. These are not sequential arguments, but adjacent ways of listening.
I did not intend these pieces as answers, but as different scales of attention: the world that keeps moving, and the body that eventually cannot. Between them lies the quiet fact of living.
Note:
Asystole: the absence of a heartbeat; the flat line where motion ceases and measurement loses its authority.
A life is felt before it is counted. We count it obsessively because we sense its impatience. We name birthdays, milestones, deadlines—as if enumeration might anchor what is already loosening. Unlike the Earth, we do not revolve indefinitely. Our bodies are not designed for perpetuity, but for precision.
A life announces itself in pulses. Each heartbeat repeats what has not yet ended, a continuation that cannot be guaranteed. We mistake repetition for permanence. We forget that rhythm is not a guarantee, only a condition—one that can fail without warning.
When the heart enters asystole, there is no drama in the event itself. No crescendo. Only the sudden absence of expectation. The future, which had been arriving automatically, stops arriving. What remains is not fear but an unfamiliar stillness, one that resists metaphor.
Death does not rush us; it simply waits until the count no longer advances. What unsettles us is not the ending, but the realization that time was never accumulating in our favor. It was passing through us, using our bodies briefly as instruments.
Yet meaning is not annulled by this brevity. On the contrary, it sharpens. Because the pulse will end, touch matters. Because the season turns, attention deepens. We learn to listen not for duration, but for resonance.
Asystole marks the moment when measurement fails, but not when significance does. The silence that follows is not empty—it is dense with everything that has already occurred. A life does not disappear; it resolves.
The heart stops. Time releases its hold. What was lived remains—complete at last, no longer needing to prove its motion.