Liora arrives at a door.
It is simple, wooden, familiar in every respect—except that it refuses to cooperate.
She pushes. Nothing. She pulls. Nothing. She tilts the handle, slides it, twists it, then stops, uncertain whether the obstruction is inside the mechanism or inside her expectations. The door does not answer. It is silent. Its resistance has no intention, no malice, no design; yet it is complete.
The first impulse is to correct. To push harder, pull differently, find a key, shout for help. Liora tries some of these. The door remains.
Then she notices the small details: a hinge slightly off, the floorboard beneath it creaking, the shadow of the knob shifting as the light changes. Each observation is a possibility. None guarantees success.
She realises something crucial: breakdown is not failure. It is not error. It is not a signal that she misunderstood the door, or that the door misunderstood her. The obstruction simply is.
You may attend to one aspect of this situation:
Notice the local mechanics: the hinge, the knob, the floorboard.
Notice the space of action: how she moves, what she can do, where her body fits.
Notice the temporal unfolding: the light, the small shifts, the hesitation, the rhythm of attempts.
Each stance reveals something different about the same event.
None can resolve it.
If you attend to the local mechanics
The door is a collection of constraints. Each part interacts with the others according to laws that are neither social nor symbolic. The knob resists, the hinge binds, the floorboard tilts. Liora’s hands find friction, but friction is not hostile. It is simply the world pressing back where she acts.
The system of wood and metal persists. She can explore its affordances, notice where a nudge shifts something slightly, where it refuses to move at all. Nothing collapses; nothing yields. There is no failure, only the ongoing reality of constraint.
If you attend to the space of action
What matters is not the door, but the body negotiating space. Liora leans, steps, shifts weight. Each posture is temporary, each move interdependent. She finds that some movements are admissible, some are not; yet no posture is right or wrong. Each cut she enacts alters the space for the next, and the door remains unmoved, unmoved as before, and yet subtly different.
If you attend to the temporal unfolding
The door is still. And yet time flows around it. Shadows shift. The light slants differently with each breath. Liora’s attempts pulse, falter, adjust. Each moment is a distinction between past attempt and present action. The door remains, but her perception shifts. Nothing resolves. Nothing accumulates. Only the present persists.
She steps back. She exhales. She is not victorious. She is not defeated.
She is with the door, in the breakdown, in the persistence of unresolvable constraint.
Nothing has been corrected.
And yet, in attending to the details, she has noticed a system. Not a symbolic system, not a rule-bound system, not a designed system. A system of possibility: what is admissible, what is persistent, what can be enacted moment by moment.
The door remains. And so does she.
Nothing else is required.
All cuts are admissible. All cuts are alive.
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