dialogues with silence

This night, and every night, it is the same question.

Here, now, by night, with this huge clock ticking on my right hip and the flashlight in my hand and my sneakers on my feet, I feel as if everything has been unreal. It is as if the past had never existed. The things I thought were so important- because of the effort I put into them- have turned out to be of small value. The things I never thought about, the things I was never able either to measure or to expect, they were the things that mattered.

But in this darkness I would not be able to say, for certain, what is was that mattered. That, perhaps, is part of Your unanswerable question!

-Thomas Merton