The Defense Is Already Finished

The afternoon sun is high, but you are lying in the dark, rehearsing a defense for a trial that hasn't started yet. You are building a perfect sentence to stop the judgment you know is coming tomorrow.

You run the conversation over and over, trying to find the words that will finally make them see you clearly, finally make them stop. But the armor you are forging in this quiet room is too heavy to wear into the future.

It will only weigh you down when the moment actually arrives. There was a man who lay beside a pool for thirty-eight years, waiting for the water to move, convinced he needed the right conditions to be healed.

The light found him there, in his exhaustion, and did not ask for his excuse. It simply said: get up.

You do not need the perfect response. You do not need to win the argument before it begins.

The light is not asking you to be right; it is asking you to be present. Stop rehearsing the speech.

The defense is already finished.