Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.

Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between.

This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs.

It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can’t even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression.

It is often easier to recognize the shifts.

They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can’t figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can’t recognize it, for the simple reason we haven’t seen it before.

These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you’ve been caught in them.