On Counting

I ask you to count, and something in you settles that a paragraph of instructions never manages. It is not the number itself. It is what the number removes.

Without it, you are making a hundred small decisions the whole time. When to stop, whether that was enough, whether you are allowed to think it was enough, whether stopping now would disappoint me. All of that noise, running underneath everything else, every single time. A number ends it instantly, because there is nothing left to judge. You are not deciding when it is enough any more. You are only counting toward a thing that has already been decided, by somebody else, in advance.

That is why you like it more than you would say out loud. It is not obedience for its own sake. It is relief from having to be the one who decides, for once, and relief is not a small thing to a man who spends his whole week deciding things for other people.

Notice where you go when you count. Your voice changes. It gets steadier, not shakier, the further you go, which tells me the counting is doing exactly what I said it does. And notice what happens on the number I choose not to give you a stopping point for. That one costs you something entirely different, because now there is nothing to arrive at, only the counting itself, for as long as I want it to continue.

You will ask, eventually, whether you are allowed to stop. Do not expect an answer straight away. The waiting is doing its own work, and it is not separate from the counting. It is the same thing, stretched further than you were ready for.