Asystole

Time does not stop; it simply ceases to include us.

Asystole names the moment when rhythm stops.
In the body, this appears as the absence of a heartbeat—the flat line where motion ceases and measurement loses its authority. What follows is not merely silence, but confirmation: a pause where measurement no longer applies.

We live by borrowed rhythms. The Earth turns without consulting us, tilting just enough to ration light and darkness, warmth and cold. Seasons are not metaphors; they are instructions. Seeds wait. Rivers loosen. Leaves release themselves without grief. Even decay keeps a schedule. Time, here, is not an abstraction—it is choreography.

The planet moves at a speed we never feel, a velocity disguised as stillness. We wake, work, eat, sleep, convinced of stability, while continents drift and oceans migrate grain by grain. The calendar pretends to measure this vastness with neat squares, but nothing in nature consents to such borders. Days spill into one another. Years argue in circles.

What we call now is only a narrow ledge between rotations. Morning leans into afternoon; summer rehearses its own disappearance. The harvest owes its abundance to the same turning that will soon undo it—the tilt that grants fullness also rehearses its absence. Our nourishment is bound to this motion: fed by recurrence, sustained by a patience we rarely learn to see.

Asystole, then, is not an interruption of order but its final clarification. Motion does not stop because it has failed; it stops because its task is complete. The heart, like the planet, keeps time only for as long as it is required to do so.