NEBULA

At sea or high in the mountains you can meet a particular kind of fog in which the world disappears completely. No horizon, no shore, no up or down, only the ground under your feet. Sounds lose their direction.

It is disorienting. After a while it can also be strangely peaceful, because there is nothing to do but wait and pay attention to what is close.

Pyrrho of Elis travelled with Alexander the Great as far as India and came home with a philosophy of not knowing. Things, he taught, are no more this than that. Neither our senses nor our opinions can tell us how they really are, so the wise response is to suspend judgement. His followers said the result was an unexpected calm.

That sounds extreme. Most of us need opinions just to get through the day. But there are stretches of life that feel like that fog: after a loss, between two chapters, in the months when every plan looks provisional. We keep trying to see through it, and we cannot.

Not everyone who is lost is searching. Some have just stopped pretending to know the way.

In those stretches it can help to lower the ambition. To stop asking where all this is going, and ask only what is in front of you. A cup of coffee, a conversation, the next small step.

Fog lifts in its own time. Until then it is enough to keep walking slowly, and to notice that you are still here.