The Same Words, Every Time

He asked me once why I say the same thing at the start, every time, in the same order, as if I had not already said it a hundred times before to him and to men before him. He wanted to know if I even mean it anymore, said that quickly, or if it has become a formality I go through the way he goes through the motions of a meeting he stopped listening to years ago.

I told him the words are not for meaning, not the way he thinks of meaning. They are for arriving. A man does not walk through a door and stand in the middle of the room a changed person. He needs a threshold, something he can feel himself cross, and a sentence repeated in exactly the same shape every time is a threshold you can trust precisely because it never moves.

If I improvised something new at the start of every session, he would spend the first several minutes working out what kind of night this was going to be, reading me for tone the way he reads everyone else all day. The repetition removes that work entirely. He hears the first four words and something in him already knows where he is standing, and that certainty is worth more to him than novelty could ever be.

This is the part people outside of it get backwards. They assume a ritual repeated is a ritual gone stale, evidence that nothing new is happening. It is the opposite. The words staying still is what lets everything underneath them move. He can be furious, or exhausted, or unbearably pleased with himself that day, and the same four words still land the same way, because they were never carrying today's meaning in the first place. They were carrying the shape of every time before it, all at once.

He asked if I ever get tired of saying them. I do not, and I have thought about why. A phrase repeated for a man because it works on him is not tedium, it is a small, exact instrument, and I have never once been bored holding a tool that still does exactly what I built it to do.