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ESSAYS

The Interruption of Time: 
on the instants that exceed continuity​

2025

There are moments in which time stops behaving as consciousness expects. It does not fully halt or accelerate, but it loses its usual shape. Continuity, that sequence that sustains the feeling of being carried by a stable thread, breaks. What appears in that fissure is not emptiness but an intensity that resists measurement. It is a form of presence that does not depend on past or future, a state in which the instant outweighs duration.

It is not an exceptional phenomenon. It happens in the folds of experience, in minimal gestures, in situations that draw no attention. A shift in the light, an unexpected silence, a movement that does not match the rhythm that preceded it. Suddenly perception stops following the flow that usually carries it and opens into a different plane. We recognize it because something within us adjusts without knowing why. For a brief moment, the structure that makes continuity possible is suspended.

This kind of suspension does not rely solely on chance. Although it often emerges spontaneously, it can also be summoned. It only requires a concentrated gesture of attention, a minimal withdrawal from perceptual automatism, a way of inhabiting the present that quiets internal noise without forcing anything. It is not a state that can be controlled, but it is a form of presence that can be activated at will. It explains nothing and yet it illuminates. It does not organize experience, yet it shifts it. It is a clarity that needs no argument.

In these breaks an uncomfortable truth appears. The continuity we trust is more fragile than it seems. It is not a natural fact but a construction repeated without awareness. Perception does not flow because reality flows, but because the mind needs to bind everything together. When the thread snaps, what is revealed is not chaos but a reality that does not depend on sequence. It is a state in which the instant holds its own meaning without needing to fit any narrative.

The interruption of time does not bring messages or symbols. It does not signal a hidden meaning. What it offers is a change in the relationship with what appears. The world presents itself without negotiation, without the filter that usually organizes what we see. There is no intention and no interpretation. Only a presence that unsettles what we assumed was self-evident. That unsettling does not create confusion. It produces a form of attention that is rarely sustained in everyday life.

The awareness that arises in these moments is not introspective. It does not invite us to think about ourselves or search for deeper readings. On the contrary. It deactivates the idea of a self coordinating experience and replaces it with a way of being without a center. It is not a loss of identity but a suspension of its dominance. For a moment, what exists does not pass through personal history or memory. It simply appears.

When time closes again, something remains. It is not an understanding or a conclusion, but a minimal modification in the way perception arranges itself. As if the recovered continuity were slightly thinner, slightly more porous, slightly more aware of itself. These breaks do not transform life, but they leave traces. Reminders that linearity is not the only way to inhabit the world.

What matters in these instants is not their rarity but their silent insistence. They cannot be possessed or repeated exactly, yet they return. They show that reality is not as stable as we believe, that experience is not a continuous thread but a succession of pressures that sometimes align and sometimes open. In those openings something appears that we did not ask for and that nevertheless rearranges perception.

The interruption of time does not promise revelation or knowledge. It offers something simpler and more radical: the evidence that continuity can fracture, and that in that fracture a mode of presence emerges that does not depend on us. An instant that does not seek meaning and yet illuminates the way we see.

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