Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

The Volition Hole

I slipped into a volition hole last night. Volition holes are hidden pit traps: you don’t see them until you’ve fallen in, and you don’t realize what’s happened until much later. But I’d fallen in. Eight o’clock found me curled up on the couch staring listlessly at a blank television set while the dog galavanted at my feet trying desperately to get my attention. My mind was a walled empty space under siege, armies of plans and responsibilities and desires hammering at the gates and scaling the walls and hurling flaming balls of pitch into the emptiness, all in vain.

One of the things you realize when you’re in the volition hole is that time is purely subjective: it can’t exist in any important way without the participation of the creatures it governs. A life shorn of activity is a life shorn of time. The clock keeps ticking in the objective world, of course: your body ages and seasons change and events eventuate, but the volitionless lie static in a bubble floating on the surge of the maelstrom, unaffected and oblivious. I did nothing, thought about nothing, accomplished nothing for three hours that passed like three seconds, then went to bed and dreamed empty dreams.

I woke to find the dog’s snout pressed earnestly into mine. New day dawning. I took him outside and, watching him perform his morning ablutions, found myself unreasonably happy to be standing there in the pre-dawn dark, shivering in the chill. Because sometime during the night I’d apparently crawled out of the volition hole, and rejoined the world of action, and of time.

It was good to be back. It’s always good to be back.

It’s good to have you back. I thought I sensed a disturbance last night.