It’s grey outside. The window to my left reveals low-hanging sky. Leaves and grass and the narrow street are all slightly dark, suggesting rain not long ago. An occasional person wanders by. Rare voices rise muted in the air. Which is the tone of this scene as a whole: muted, subdued, slow.

For the past hour I’ve been struggling to find words for this page. Looking inward, I’ve been scraping away, clawing in an effort to excavate something from a landscape that seems to have little to offer. Only when I pause for a moment, swing toward the window, and connect with the muffled world is there finally an inkling of what might want to be said.

In a culture of constant content, it’s sometimes easy to forget. In a human environment that can seem fixated – if not insistent – upon updates and refreshes, new posts and additional tweets, blogs and vlogs and the latest news, it’s sometimes easy to forget that on certain occasions there really is nothing that needs saying. Nothing that needs saying by me, anyway. Sometimes it’s silence and slowness, subdued sounds and muted light that offer everything.

It’s curious how uncomfortable this makes me. Sitting here for only a few seconds, taking in the water-speckled leaves outside, I find myself itching to move, to do something else. To do something, period. Some kids walk by, laughing at an inside joke. Their presence breaks this spell for a moment, pulls my attention. For an instant I’m distracted. Then I’m back staring at those droplets and arguing inside. Surely this – just this – can’t be enough?

But maybe it is. Just a few words tapped out on a rainy afternoon and a return to the easy lope of a jogger moving past this window, heading I know not where. The sudden silence once their footsteps have moved out of earshot. The cool air. The whistling of a bird. Those dappled leaves and the grey, low-hanging sky.

– Neil