Volume 7 · The Long Afternoon · Essay 43

Colonel Chabert Syndrome

A syndrome is a pattern with a medical air about it. Colonel Chabert Syndrome needs no doctor, only a mirror.

It is not an illness, and there is no injection for it. The treatment is older and slower: honest priorities, kept daily, in the presence of people who will tell you the truth.

Watch the woman lighting the evening lamp in a small flat after a hard day. Nobody taught her that ritual builds a floor under the falling feeling. She simply knows.

In the end, life asks only whether we were awake while it happened. No ceremony needed. Begin with the very next decision.