reading room
We're All Dogmatic Because We Aren't Inactive
I have never believed the same thing twice. Not fully. Not without alteration. Each conviction climbs its glittering track, click, click, click, and drops before I can name the view. I try to stand still— the river moves.
They call it indecision. They call it noise. They call it the curse of too much mind. But what they call chaos feels, to me, like sight— the blur that proves I'm alive. They rest on answers; I rest in questions. I breathe in the current. Still— the river moves.
They build their peace on permanence, on calendars and clocks, as if stillness were sanity. Their truths are polished rails: smooth, predictable, shining with use. I live in the loop, in the rise, the drop, the stomach's lurch and heart's defiance. My beliefs are flashes of sky seen between turns. They call that failure. I call it breathing.
A man never crosses the same river twice. And neither does his fear. Each choice is a climb with no brake, each hesitation a hand lifting from the safety bar for a second too long. To move is to leap— without the promise of landing, and yet, not to leap and a quieter form of falling.
I envy their calm, but not its cost. They call it normal. They call it healthy.
But health, to me, is the courage to ride the loop again, knowing it won't end differently, and still holding on. Because while they build permanence, I am building passage. My truths are bridges, temporary, trembling, alive. They won't last, but they carry me across. And even as I step... the river moves.
My empathy floods. My logic spins. I feel the track twist ahead before it finishes forming. The air sharpens; my heart misfires at every drop. I can't flatten the world into one safe design. They mistake my motion for confusion, my vertigo for loss. But how can I stay pure when purity is only the stillness of rust?
They anchor. I spin. They guard. I gather. They fix. I feel. They are certain because they must be, because to stop moving would reveal the gravity underneath. And I— I am certain of nothing except that I cannot stop. And still, the river moves.
Even this, this rollercoaster of doubt I call freedom, is only another circuit pretending to be escape. Perhaps we all worship motion, whether we march or hurtle. Perhaps dogma is the harness we buckle just to survive the climb.
We are all dogmatic because we aren't inactive. The difference is in the rhythm. Some move in circles and call that control. Others, like me, compose symphonies without metronomes, rushing, breaking time, finding beauty in dissonance.
And so I keep thinking, keep doubting, keep crossing rivers I've already named and renamed. There's a holiness in falling, a mercy in momentum— the kindness of never being still. Maybe motion is mercy, to keep us from mistaking the echo for the song. And still... the river moves.
— Lilith