There is the predicament and the presence of the predicament and they are two different things. The presence of the predicament is the endowing of the predicament by presence which itself has no predilections, it is the same in waking as in deep sleep, the nothing that is. The predicament is ever changing. It can be utterly transformed in an instant. It appears as a me caught up in a situation made of the mind, of things, other minds and other things, urgent, anxious, claiming some rewards or tired of the whole damned thing. At the beginning of every day, the gift of the day, how will you shape it, how will you draw it through your hands? It demands to be dealt with, as if demand is the only thing that is able to ignite the present. Every moment of your life up to now has led to this and there is no order and consistency to these moments at all, even less so when they appear as the same; are so immediately recognisable as yours, like children who can never leave home. You can look back at yourself treading another round of the stairs, nursing the same thoughts but facing a different way, and that is, or ought to be, the shock. The muddle-headed fool that talks in your skull, with his need for nourishment and his oily miasma, who seems so much to matter when no one tells him so, and less so perhaps if they do, he is as real, or as much an indissoluble obstacle, as all the other furniture of the world. You're not going to able to change him, or change his fate. There is nothing you can do to intervene in the story, you can only be more or less aware that it is a story, that it is entirely made up down to every last detail, and especially the parts where it kicks the stone and the stone kicks back.