Nobody remembers entering, and that is the most striking thing about the whole business. There was no starting line, no signal, no moment when somebody explained the rules or asked whether anybody agreed to them. At some point everyone was simply running, and everybody around them was running too, and it did not occur to anybody to stop and ask what the race actually was.
There is no finish either, though that takes considerably longer to notice. Each stage appears to be the final one while it is being approached, and when it is reached there is another beyond it, and everybody has already moved on to that. So a person can run for forty years towards a line that keeps being redrawn just ahead of them by nobody in particular for no stated reason.
And the whole time, the country outside the window is going past at a speed that makes it entirely unviewable. Nobody mentions this because everybody is travelling at the same speed and the blur looks normal from inside. It only becomes obvious afterwards, if there is an afterwards.
What cannot be seen at speed
When anything travels fast, the things nearest to it are the first to disappear. Look out of a moving window and the far hills hold perfectly still while everything close by is a smear. That is exactly what happens in a life run at speed, and it is worth thinking about which things are near.
The distant things stay visible. The goals, the plans, the year after next, the position to be reached eventually. What blurs is everything near enough to touch. The people in the same house. What one's own face looks like now. What is actually enjoyed as against what has been decided to be enjoyable. What today felt like while it was happening.
So people arrive at fifty having successfully reached almost everything they aimed at, and cannot describe a single ordinary afternoon from the previous decade. Not because those afternoons were empty, because they were not. Because nobody was looking out of the window, and the afternoons went past at speed like everything else.
Why it is so hard to stop
Everybody is running, and that is the first difficulty. To slow down in the middle of a crowd that is moving is not a private decision, it is a highly visible one, and it will be read by others as a sign that something has gone wrong. People will ask, kindly, whether everything is all right, and the asking is its own pressure.
The second difficulty is that the running has become the answer to a question nobody has had to ask for many years. What is this life for? For this. What are we doing? Getting to the next thing. Slow down and the question is standing right there waiting, having waited very patiently, and it is much larger than it was when it was last looked at.
And the third, which almost nobody admits out loud, is that the speed itself has become comfortable. Not pleasant, and not enjoyable, but comfortable in exactly the way that noise is comfortable to somebody who does not want to hear what is underneath it. Silence is the threat. The running is the protection.
How fast it comes back
The thing that surprises everybody is how quickly seeing returns. It does not take years of practice or any particular technique. Stop moving for two days, properly, without filling them with something else, and by the second afternoon things begin to come into focus that were there the whole time and had been invisible for a decade.
That is genuinely a shock. Most people assume that whatever was lost in those years is gone, worn away by use, and would need to be rebuilt slowly and with great effort if it could be rebuilt at all. It is not gone. It was simply unavailable at that speed, in the way a photograph is unavailable from a moving car, and the moment the car stops the picture is perfectly clear and always was.
Which means nothing was actually lost in all those years. It was only unseen. Whether that is a comfort or the exact opposite of one is not a question that settles, and both answers are true depending on the day it is asked.
