When the News Arrives

June 19

Though our heads are full of memories, time still escapes any form of emotional measurement. 

We can remember flashes of infancy, riding bikes and the visceral, never-repeated feeling of pulling a tooth. We can remember all the firsts—the kisses, the car crashes, all the adrenaline-filled spikes of youth. But we forget the context, any sense of the amount of ordinary time passing between moments.

We can pull out our calculators and calculate by 24, by 12, by 365, carefully counting the 31s and the 30s and that lone 28, but what is the longest amount of time you can actually imagine—hold in your head and feel. A day? A month? A year? 

It’s easy enough to add up to 900—the days from January 1st, 1963 to June 19th, 1965. But do we know what 899 days feels like—each repeating the same rumors of some change, something big, but each leaving you believing a little less, wondering if anything was ever going to be different? 

Each one of those days the same, not knowing the gale-force hurricane of news that was building up, rattling down your way like a ten-ton truck doing 90 miles-an-hour on a two-lane road, news shot from a far-off place, arriving forever too late but arriving today—the 19th of June. The first day in decades that the past brought news of a better future.

Morning Reading is a daily email to help center yourself, reflect, and prepare for the day. It’s sent with love from your friend, Zach in Austin, Texas. He even drew the logo himself.

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