There Is A Photograph On That Shelf

It is on the shelf in the front room and it is not even a good photograph.

You are twenty three. You are at somebody's place after something, and you are not posing, and your arm is round somebody whose name you would have to think about now.

And you look like that.

It has been on that shelf for nineteen years and you did not really see it for the first ten. Somewhere around thirty five you started noticing it as you went past, and now there is not a day when you do not.

You do not stop and stare at it. It is faster than that. Eight tenths of a second on the way to the kitchen and you have made the comparison and moved on, and you do it about six times a day, which is roughly two thousand times a year.

Nobody knows. Your wife dusts it. Your children have never once looked at it. It is invisible to every person in this house except you.

And here is what I want to name, because I think you have half named it yourself and have not been able to finish the sentence.

You are not comparing yourself to that man. You are being judged by him. Six times a day, for years, by somebody who has no idea what has happened since and never will.

Say not thou, What is the cause

There is a warning in Ecclesiastes that almost nobody quotes, and it is precisely about this, and it is blunter than you would expect.

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. (Ecclesiastes 7:10, King James Version)

Do not say, what is the cause that the former days were better than these, for you do not ask wisely concerning this.

Notice that it does not argue with the premise. It does not say the former days were not better. It says the question is not a wise one.

You have a book that calls this a badly formed question rather than a sinful thought, and Ecclesiastes 7:10 has never once treated it as something to repent of. The verse says you do not inquire wisely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who quietly retires a question a man has been asking for years.

You are able to feel the difference between those two, and it matters. Nobody is telling you that you are ungrateful. You are being told that the question does not have an answer that helps, and that asking it repeatedly is doing something to you.

And it is a question, which is worth noticing. The comparison you make six times a day arrives with a question attached. Why is that man better than this one. What happened. Whose fault.

Every one of those is unanswerable, which means the asking never terminates, which is why it comes back tomorrow.

You are asking something that has no ending, and the written word has never once required you to answer it before you can move. Ecclesiastes 7:10 calls the inquiry unwise rather than the memory sinful, and the Spirit of God is the one who releases a man from a question he cannot close.

So we are not going to answer it. We are going to remove the thing that keeps prompting it.

Turn it face down

Here is the instruction and it is so small that it will feel like nothing.

Turn the photograph face down.

You are able to remove an object from your line of sight, and doing that has never once been the same thing as denying that it happened. It is written that a man does not inquire wisely who asks why the former days were better, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man reaching for a frame in his own front room.

Not thrown away. Not hidden. Not put in a drawer where it becomes a thing you are avoiding, which is its own kind of shrine.

Face down, on the same shelf, where it has always been.

Because the mechanism here is not emotional, it is physical. Six times a day an object enters your visual field and triggers a fixed sequence, and the sequence has been running so long that it is now faster than your thinking. You cannot argue with it because it finishes before the argument starts.

You can, however, stop the trigger.

You have a habit that runs on sight rather than on choice, and interrupting it at the eye has never once been a lesser cure than interrupting it at the heart. The Spirit of God is the one who breaks a groove a man has worn into his own day, and Ecclesiastes 7:10 tells him to stop asking a particular question rather than to feel differently about the answer.

Two weeks. That is all this needs. In two weeks you will walk past that shelf without anything happening, and you will notice one day that nothing happened, and that is the whole of the result.

Then go outside with one of them

Now the second half, because face down on a shelf on its own is a subtraction, and this site does not deal in subtractions.

After you turn it over, go outside and do ten minutes of something with one of your children.

You are able to put something in the place where the comparison used to sit, and ten minutes with one of them has never once been a smaller thing than a photograph. It is written that the former days question is not wisely asked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man an actual afternoon in exchange for a remembered one.

Throw something. Go to the end of the road. Kick something up and down the driveway badly.

And here is the part I actually care about. Your son is fourteen and he has no photograph of you at twenty three in his head. He has never seen that version and does not know it existed and would not be interested if he did.

To him you are the man who is here. That is the only version he has ever had, and it is the one he will remember when he is forty and looking at a shelf of his own.

You have a child in this house for whom the man in front of him has never once been a disappointing version of anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a father and a son on a driveway, and Ecclesiastes 7:10 retires the comparison instead of trying to win it.

Ten minutes. Then in. And leave the frame where it is.