September 28, 2026 Post by : Editorial Reflections

The fog came in overnight and stayed. By morning, the lake had disappeared entirely. I could see the end of the dock, and then nothing. Just white, soft and total, like the world had been erased and not yet redrawn. I stood there with my coffee and felt, for reasons I could not explain, a small surge of panic. The far shore was gone. The islands were gone. The heron was gone. Everything I used to orient myself had simply vanished.

I almost went back inside. There was no point sitting by a lake you could not see. But something kept me there, and I am glad it did, because the fog turned out to be one of the best teachers I have ever had.

The Discomfort of Not Seeing Ahead

I am a person who likes to know what is coming. I check the weather. I read the reviews. I plan the route. I make the list. The fog took all of that away in a single night, and what was left was just me, standing on a dock, unable to see anything beyond my own two feet.

At first, I tried to fight it. I strained my eyes. I leaned forward. I tried to will the far shore back into existence. It did not work. The fog did not care about my plans or my preferences. It was there, and it was going to stay there, and the only thing I could do was decide how to be in it.

So I sat down. I listened. The fog had a sound, which I had never noticed before. It was the sound of water lapping against the dock, but muffled, like someone had put a blanket over the world. A loon called somewhere out in the white, and I could not tell if it was near or far. It did not matter. It was there. I was there. That was enough.

I thought about all the things I do not know. The future, mostly. What will happen with my work. What will happen with the people I love. What will happen to this lake, this town, this way of life. I cannot see any of it. The fog does not lift for me. And yet, sitting there, I realized that I had been living in fog my whole life and simply pretending otherwise. The clarity I thought I had was an illusion. The fog was just honest about it.

Making Peace With the Unseen

The fog burned off around ten. The far shore reappeared, then the islands, then the heron, standing exactly where it had been standing before. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. I had spent two hours in the not-knowing, and I had survived it, and I had even, in a strange way, enjoyed it.

I do not go looking for fog. But when it comes, I try to remember that morning on the dock. I try to remember that not seeing ahead is not the same as being lost. Sometimes it is just the world asking you to be present, here, in the white, with no map and no plan, listening for the loon.

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