What Is “It Hasn’t Sunk In”

Contents

1. The picture, stated fairly
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. The result, read from the numerator side
5. Knowing is reading a mark
6. What is late
7. What “can’t believe” is a report of
8. What it does not mean
9. What it costs
10. If this lands badly
11. An ordinary Tuesday

The phone goes at ten past two on a Tuesday. Your sister says the sentence, and you say okay, and then you put the kettle on. You make the tea. You tell her you will call back in an hour, and you do, and you handle the logistics well. At six someone asks how you are and you say it hasn’t sunk in yet, and the person nods and does not ask what you mean.

Or the email comes on a Thursday and says you got it, the job or the grant or the offer on the house. You read it. You read it again, and then you forward it to your partner with no message so that someone else can read it too. You say I can’t believe it, out loud, to an empty kitchen. You do not doubt the email. You are checking it anyway.

The picture underneath these sentences is plain, and mostly kind. A fact arrives and the head takes it at once. That is the knowing, and it is quick. The feeling is slow, because the fact has some distance to go. It has to sink in, the way water goes into dry ground or a stone goes down through a pond. Until it has, you are in a gap between the two, and the gap has no fault in it. You are early. The feeling will catch up with the fact.

Part of this should be kept. Something is late, and nobody should be hurried through it. The sentence is also not a boast or a complaint; it is an accurate report from inside a state that people recognise in each other. What I want to examine is the second half of the picture, the claim about where the lateness is. The picture places it in the fact, which is the one place the foundation I work from says nothing further can happen.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. The speaker was not wrong about any fact. The fact did not change between the call and the supermarket, or between the email and the fifth reading, or between the diagnosis and the funeral. A picture in which the fact is the thing that moves cannot explain a true sentence about a fact that did not move. Something else moved, or is still to, and the picture has placed the lag in the wrong object.

The neighbours

This ground has been walked near before, and I should say where. What Is Grief is the nearest, and I lean on it. It says that a death changes the actual at once and cannot change the predictor at once, because there is no erase function for a denominator, only retraining, record by record. That is machinery this essay uses, and I am not claiming it. What that essay takes is the long aftermath of a loss, the ambush at four in the afternoon, and which half of the feeling can complete. This one takes the sentence about the lag itself and the picture of a travelling fact inside it, and it runs as readily on a win as on a death. The grief essay does not need the sentence I can’t believe it and does not read it.

What Is Unmoved owns I felt nothing and it didn’t affect me. It argues that whatever was perceived changed the one who perceived it, so a person who reports no effect is reporting on a reading and not on a state. I take that premise as given and do not re-argue it. What differs is the case. That piece is about a change that did not register in the report. This one is about a fact that has registered, as information, completely, and where the person says the change they expected has not come. The unmoved person says nothing happened to them. The person who says it hasn’t sunk in is saying that something has happened and something else has not.

What Is Proof shows what a record can settle, which is an argument about what happened, and shows that the settling is a fact about the reader’s expectation. In the cases above the record settled the argument at once. Nobody is asking for more proof. And What Is Managing Expectations owns the clause I use at the end, that the denominator is not ours to command.

I searched the site for sink in, sunk in, disbelief, shock, feel real, can’t believe and take in, and then for the nouns around them, with the content of the posts fetched and searched. I found no earlier piece on the phrase. The older matches I opened were incidental: a character in a story, a theatre idiom, a turn of phrase in an unrelated essay. If an earlier essay is out there that I missed, I would want to link it.

The result, read from the numerator side

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and results derived from one axiom, and I name each one I use. This essay is built on R8, the human experiences only the quotient — not the Actual, not the Expectation, but R. It stands on P4, the Reality Equation: R is the Actual divided by Expectation, where Expectation holds both the host’s subconscious prediction and its ideas. Surprise, in the foundation’s locked sense, is the logarithm of the magnitude of that quotient, and it is signed.

Most readings of R8 in this series take the half of its sentence about the denominator. You do not meet your own expectation; you meet its output. That is the half the essays on willpower, managing expectations and the open mind use. The sentence has two nots. Not the Actual is the other one, and I find no essay in the series that reads it.

It needs careful reading, because it is easy to get it wrong in either direction. It does not say that the Actual fails to reach experience. The Actual is the upper term of the ratio, so it reaches experience as that term, and on the day it arrives whole. What the result says is that it is in the quotient and is not the quotient. The ratio is what is met. So there are three things to keep apart. There is the event, which is in the Past. There is the Actual, which is the event’s contribution to the ratio. And there is the quotient, which is the only thing that is met, and which takes its other term from the person.

Two more pieces of the foundation need to be on the table. The first is P0, the axiom: the past is immutable. An event, once it has happened, is finished, and nothing can be added to it or taken off it. The second is R9: the Past is inaccessible, and the abundance of present records makes it appear otherwise. A person never holds the event. A person holds a mark that was made in the present because of it: a voice on a phone, an email, a scoreboard, a scan.

Knowing is reading a mark

Put those together and the first sentence of the pair, I know it’s true, becomes something specific. It is a report that a mark has been read and held. The call was heard. The email was opened. The mark is a present thing, and the host reads it the way a host reads any record. By the premise inside the Unmoved essay, perceiving it altered the host. The reading is not nothing, and the person who has read it is no longer where they were.

Take the man with the email. The mark is the page, and he has read it, and holds it, and could not be talked out of it. That is the whole of the knowing, and it was complete at the first reading. The quotient he is meeting is a different matter. The denominator it is divided by was laid down over years by marks of a different kind, the thousands of ordinary days in which no such email came. It still carries that. A single page is added to it, and does not replace it in one reading. So he rereads. The rereading is not doubt of the page. It is a host meeting the ratio again, and again, against a denominator that has been added to once and not yet enough.

That sorts the three cases without strain. The woman in aisle six had read the mark of her father’s death many times and held it throughout. What she had not met was the quotient of a world in which that brand of tea is no longer bought for anyone. That is a different reading, made against a different part of her life’s accumulated record, and nothing she had read until that aisle had touched it. The daughter at the funeral is the strangest case for the picture and an easy one for this account. A year of warning is a year of reading a mark, and holding it. It is not a year in which the ordinary mornings the denominator is made of stopped being how mornings went.

Figure 01

Three things the phrase runs together

• Knowing “I know it’s true.” A present mark has been read and held: the call, the email, the scoreboard. Can be complete at the first reading.
• Feeling it “It doesn’t feel real.” The quotient, which is the only thing met: the Actual over the denominator then in force. Set by the denominator as much as by the fact.
• Sinking in “It hasn’t sunk in yet.” The denominator being added to by later marks of the fact. The fact does not move. Has no completion point the foundation can name.

What is late

If the fact is whole on the day, and the knowing is complete on the day, then what is late is the only remaining term. R2 says records update expectation forward and never re-open. That is how a denominator changes, and it is the only way the foundation gives. It changes by the addition of marks. It cannot change by being willed lower or by the fact being thought about harder, and it does not change by itself.

This turns the picture round. On the picture, the fact sinks and the person waits. On the foundation, the fact is where it was, and the person’s denominator is being added to by every later mark of that fact that the person meets. The empty chair at breakfast is a mark. So is the first time you are asked your name and give the old one, and so is the telling: you say it to the ninth person and watch their face, and their face is a record. The first Monday back at work is one. The sentence it didn’t hit me until I got home is what this account predicts, since home is where the marks are densest. I report that as ordinary speech and not as a finding.

There is a limit to what this gives, and I would rather state it than let it be inferred. The foundation has no expression that takes the size of a fact and the state of a denominator and returns the size of what is felt. I cannot say why one person is flat at the call and another is on the floor, or why one aisle does it and another does not. All I can say is that R8 does not license the inference from the size of the fact to the size of the feeling, because the fact is only the upper term. A big fact and a flat afternoon are not a contradiction in the foundation. They would be a contradiction only for a picture in which the feeling is the fact, arriving.

What “can’t believe” is a report of

The same machinery handles the win, and nothing new has to be brought in. The email said yes. The quotient is large, and it is large against a denominator laid down by years of emails that said no or said nothing. The surprise is signed, and here the sign is positive, since the actual has come in above the expectation. The sentence I can’t believe it is accurate as a report of the quotient. It is a mistaken report of the record, if it is taken as one.

That is why the man with the email is not confused. He is reading a ratio that is not what he expected, and the page in front of him is accurate. It is also why a winner is seldom told that something is wrong, and why the same sentence said of a death gets a different kind of sympathy. The machinery is one and the sign differs. The foundation’s surprise is signed, and negative where the actual falls short, and the sentence is neutral between them.

What it does not mean

It does not mean the feeling is a mistake. The feeling is the quotient, which is the one thing that is met. Nothing in this says it should have come sooner, or that a better-organised person would have had it by now. If anything it removes a reproach. A person who says it hasn’t sunk in is not failing to do something the fact requires, since the fact requires nothing.

It does not say the flat first hour is a verdict. R8 has the felt thing as a ratio and not a measure of the fact, so a calm afternoon after terrible news does not tell you how much the news weighs. It also does not tell you that the person is cold, or strong, or in denial. I mean that last point to apply to how you read yourself and how you read anyone else.

It does not say that when it sinks in the matter is over. I find no sign given to the quotient beyond the sign of surprise, and nothing in the foundation about where it settles. The later marks may be met with pain for a long time, or may not. I find nothing in the foundation that promises either.

And it does not say the Actual is unmet. I would not want R8’s not the Actual to be read as saying the fact never reaches a person. It reaches them as the upper term of the only thing they meet.

What it costs

It costs the promise. It will sink in is said kindly and is a forecast the foundation cannot back with a date. The denominator is added to by marks, and I cannot say which mark will matter or when a person will meet it. I can say that the fact will not be doing the arriving.

It costs the idea that the lag has a schedule of its own. If the fact were travelling, there would be a rate, and one could ask whether it was going quickly or slowly. With no travelling fact there is no rate to ask about. The pace is the marks met, and those are in the world and in the person’s days, and the person does not command them. This is the clause the managing-expectations essay owns, and I will not repeat its derivation. It applies here in the plainest form: nobody can reach in and put the denominator where it ought to be.

It costs the comfort of when it hits me, which is sometimes said as if a date had been set. A date has not been set, and what hits is a mark, whatever mark comes. The ordinary and unwelcome corollary is that one can be ambushed, and that an ambush is the denominator being added to in a way nobody chose.

And it costs this piece something. If construction 01 is wrong, and knowing and feeling are one act after all, then the picture was right about the shape and wrong only about where the lag sits. I can state what would show that, and I have.

An ordinary Tuesday

These are practice and not grounds. They are revisable on evidence, and none of them is a way to make a fact sink in, because I find no such way in the foundation.

1. Do not read the first hour as a verdict. Your own flatness, or someone else’s, says what the ratio was against the denominator then in force. It says nothing about how much the news weighs or how much anyone cares.
2. Let the rereading be reading. The man checking the email for the fifth time is reading a mark. It does no harm, and it is not doubt. Neither is the woman who tells the story again.
3. Do not forecast the feeling. I’ll deal with it when it hits me assumes a date and a mark you cannot know. You can say instead that it is not here yet, which is true and makes no promise.
4. With someone else’s news, do not ask whether it has sunk in. The question carries the picture. Ask what they have been told and what has changed in their day, which are marks.
5. Expect that the marks will not arrive in order. A supermarket aisle may do what a funeral did not. This is the mechanism working as it does, and it is not a setback.