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Tonight at 8:04, the year crosses its line and fall starts.
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Three thousand years ago a book crossed its own line. The I Ching is split into two halves, and the first half opens with heaven and earth, the two largest things there are.
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The second half opens with a young man, a young woman, and a text about attraction.
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You Did Not Imagine It. You Felt It Somewhere He Never Got To.
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The hexagram is number 31. Its name is Xian, and it gets translated as Influence, or Wooing. Whoever ordered the book put courtship at the front of the human half on purpose, the way heaven and earth sit at the front of the other one.
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The trigrams say it plainly. The still mountain sits underneath and the open lake sits on top, and the old commentary says the man places himself under the woman, which is what makes the thing move at all.
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You are about to read a three thousand year old ruling on a man who texts.
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It reads attraction as a body, from the floor up. Six lines, six places on a person, each one a different depth of being affected by someone:
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The big toe. It has started and nobody can see it yet. |
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The calves. You move because he moved, and the text calls that bad. |
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The thighs. You hold on to whoever you are following, and you will be sorry. |
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The heart. Kept still and kept open, the only one the book praises. |
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The back of the neck. The stiffest part of the body, where the will does not bend. |
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The jaws, the cheeks and the tongue. Talk with nothing under it. |
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That last one is where the text does something it almost never does. Everywhere else the book hands down a verdict, good fortune or misfortune, go on or stay put. For the mouth, it hands down nothing.
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Three thousand years of ruling on everything, and the man who is all tongue does not get a ruling.
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You can find him in any American kitchen at eleven at night. He is a paragraph on a screen about how he feels, sent from somewhere else, with a Saturday in it that never gets a time attached.
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The words arrive on time, every time, and nothing else ever does.
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It is usually not lying. It is usually not a game. It is a man operating from the top of the body, where it costs nothing and carries nothing.
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If he comes back with more of it, the part to watch is not the wording. Anyone can improve the wording. It is whether anything below his jaw moves, starting with a day that has a time attached to it.
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The only one of the six places that belongs to you is the heart, and the book says to keep it still and keep it open.
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Also True
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What They Found
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In 2003 at UCLA, a team put people in an MRI scanner and had them play a simple ball tossing game on a screen with two other players. The other players were software. Partway through, the software stopped throwing to the participant. The region that lit up, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, is one of the same regions that registers the distress of physical pain. It was a few minutes of a game with a computer, and the brain filed it under pain.
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The Mirror
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What is the date on the last message where he named a day and a time in the same sentence?
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Today’s Devotion: Before bed, scroll back through the last ten messages from whoever is taking up room in your head and count how many contain a day, a time, and a place. Write the number on the back of an envelope and leave it on the counter.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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