It's a strange time to have a human brain.

You can understand that something exists without quite believing that it belongs in the world.

You watch a demonstration. You read the explanation. You even use the thing yourself. And yet some part of you files it under an older category: trick, experiment, someday.

Then you encounter it again, this time in an ordinary setting. A friend mentions it. Someone at work depends on it. The remarkable becomes part of the furniture.

Your expectations eventually catch up. But there is a period in between that can feel strangely difficult to describe.

Call it the lag.

The world doesn't need your permission to change. You do need time to decide how to live in it.

The lag is not stupidity. It is the work of revising a picture of reality that has helped you navigate your life. Every new possibility asks something of that picture. Some can be added easily. Others move the walls.

It is tempting to treat being early as a moral achievement. To divide people into those who get it and those who are behind. But keeping up is not the same thing as understanding, and surprise is not a character flaw.

A more useful question might be: what do I need to reconsider, and what still matters just as much?

Your attention is finite. Your relationships take time. Your body has a pace. None of these facts becomes obsolete because a new model arrives.

Be interested. Try the thing. Ask the awkward question. Then go for a walk without narrating it to a machine.

You are allowed to remain a person while the future sorts itself out.