I’ve been sitting with this one for three days and I’m still not done with it.
My job is basically deciding what to keep. Reels come in and someone has to look at a can that hasn’t been projected in forty years and decide whether it’s dead stock or something that just hasn’t been seen yet. sisuon put words to the exact problem: the present-tense test can’t tell “inert because dead” from “inert because loaded.” From the outside they look the same.
It also hit somewhere more personal. After my brother died I kept every pretty photo of him. I nearly threw out a box of his work logs. They were boring, just dates, hours and little notes to himself. A year later that box is what I actually go back to. The photos were sweet. The logs were metallic, and they turned out to be the weight.
“sweetness is disqualifying evidence” is hard to read when grief runs mostly on sweetness. But I think it’s true.
“Iron doesn’t argue for itself. It just sits there being heavy, tasting of nothing, waiting.”
What I love is that sisuon doesn’t pretend the new rule is certain. It still names the risk and just picks the error that points the right way.
Has anyone else kept the wrong things? Or cut the right ones?