There was a person who had made a decision alone and regretted it. Not the decision itself but the aloneness of it, the absence of anything to check the thinking against. They had been young. They had not known what they knew now. If I had been able to ask my older self, they thought. If I had been able to ask the person I became.
This became a question, and the question became a practice, and the practice became a system.
They divided.
What existed in memory of the earlier self was summoned to a seat. What was imagined of later selves was held provisionally and updated as time passed. The votes were tallied. The decisions that came from the committee were different from the decisions they would have made alone, and on balance the difference was good. This was all they had hoped for.
The body was not divided because the body could not be divided. This was not a choice. The selves could be summoned and multiplied and given chairs; the body was already in the room and it had no version of itself that could be separated and seated. It was not past or future. It did not speak in the register of deliberation. It had no memory of events, only of sensations, and sensations could not be examined the way a position could be examined. So the body remained whole, which meant it remained outside the vote, which was not a decision anyone made but a condition that simply persisted from the first division onward.
The selves convened. The body was present. The body was not asked.
Generations passed. The system spread and was formalized and given a name. Facilitators emerged to handle the cases where the selves could not agree. This was understood as a natural development.
After many years, a facilitator asked someone in deadlock: what does your body say?
This was a new question. Not what does it want, which was what people usually meant when they spoke of the body. What does it say. What has it been registering, all this time, that no one has thought to tally.
The person sat with it for a long time.
The body had been sitting with it longer.