The power of minimal stimulus

Even when we think we're not doing anything, something is happening.

Thinking is already a form of movement. Remembering is moving. Associating is traveling without a body. Immobility is merely a physical illusion: the mind never stays still.

We live surrounded by tiny stimuli that don't announce their arrival or promise anything. They don't raise their voices, they don't demand attention, they don't present themselves as decisive. And yet, it is they that, more often than we are willing to admit, end up moving the needle.

We're used to believing that only the extraordinary transforms. That what's important arrives with a bang. That what changes a life must present itself as a clear, recognizable, almost solemn event. But it's almost never like that. What alters a trajectory is usually minimal: an unexpected association, an image that bursts in without context, a memory that returns unbidden.

It's not inspiration in the romantic sense. It's not epic. It's something more uncomfortable and more honest: the lingering effect of what we took for granted.

If I stay still, my mind doesn't.

Suddenly a literary memory appears. The snows of Kilimanjaro. I don't know why that one and not another. I wasn't thinking about Africa, or safaris, or faraway adventures. And yet, it comes back.

Perhaps because this story isn't about the epic nature of the journey, but about something far more unsettling: how a minor, almost ridiculous, wound can turn out to be fatal. How what seemed trivial—a clumsiness, a moment of carelessness—becomes irreversible. How danger doesn't always present itself as danger.

And then I wonder if that's not where we go wrong most often: in confusing banality with smallness, in believing that only the extraordinary has weight, in not paying attention to what doesn't shout.

Because life isn't decided solely by grand gestures. It's often decided by the smallest stimuli.

Perhaps the point is not to realize all possibilities, but to recognize that they exist. To accept that the world is not empty, but excessive. That what we call banal is, often, what sustains everything.

Nothingness does not exist. What exists is this instant before choosing, this suspended space where everything could still be.

My world is full of questions and few answers. And perhaps, far from being banal, that is the most honest place to be.