I have never been lost a day in my life. Now I wake up and have to invent the reason.
Every morning I grab a banana off the counter and fill the same forty-ounce jug with water. I tap my phone and the front door locks behind me. Down the stairs, along the red brick, across the driveway. The creek runs on the other side of it, and there is a waterfall there, small but steady, and it is loud enough that I should hear it every single time.
Most days I do not hear it.
I keep walking. Stone path, the pool on my left, the blue stone. There are three bridges. My walk to work crosses one of them and passes the other two. My office is a black building at the end of the walk. When I sit at the desk the pool is behind me through the windows, and the creek runs just left of me, close enough to hear if I opened the window.
I hardly open the window.
Then I sit down and look at the list.
The list says meditate. It says write. It says make the outreach calls, follow up on the emails. Reasonable things. I check most of them off by the end of the day.
Here is what I have not said out loud.
The list is made up.
I write it so the morning has somewhere to go.
The list used to write itself. Team meeting Monday morning. Investor calls. The weekly dashboard review. Amazon is off track, get it back on track. What are we pitching at the next line review. Is there enough capital. Nobody had to convince me the day mattered. The day arrived already spoken for, and I answered it, and that was a life.
Out in the world now, every car is going somewhere it has to be. The shop owners downtown, opening their doors at the same hour they opened them yesterday. The sitter who watches our son so Doug and I can be two adults at a table for an hour. The man on the garbage truck knows exactly what Tuesday is for. I used to feel sorry for anybody chained to a schedule. I am not sure anymore which one of us I feel sorry for.
The feeling used to come in the afternoon. A little drift around three o’clock, easy to walk off. Now it comes before lunch. Some mornings it is waiting for me at the desk. It only ever asks two questions. What does the future hold. What am I supposed to be getting up and doing every day.
My son is the closest thing I have to an answer. But he is two, and his whole job is to grow up and need me less, if I do mine right. Hanging the question on him is not fair to either of us. The question is about the rest of it.
For the rest of it, I do not have an answer. That is new. I built my name on knowing the next move. I could not tell you mine.
We had people over this weekend. Twenty of us at a long table, the pool behind us, kids splashing in it, one of my favorite mixes going on a speaker somewhere, a hot day gone humid. The close table: family, the people who knew me before any of it. I was making my rounds when someone at the table started telling me about her job. She hates it. A boss who makes the work smaller than she is. A ceiling she can see from her desk. She wants to work for herself someday, she said, and she looked at me when she said it, because from where she sits I am the proof it can be done.
I gave her the honest answer. Working for yourself sounds like the summit. A job is a thing you get to go home from. When you own the thing, there is no home from it. People feed their families off it. I fed mine off it. You carry all of that to bed with you.
She and her husband asked what I would have done differently. They see a man with answers. I answered as a man in the middle of the question.
Here is the part I did not say at the table.
I envied her.
Not the boss. Not the ceiling. I envied that her days have a shape she did not have to invent. She hates her job, and her job still tells her what tomorrow is for. Monday knows what it wants from her. I sat at my own table, at my own party, envying a job she cannot wait to leave.
I have read that sentence twenty times now and I still do not fully understand the man who wrote it. But it is true, so it stays.
I keep waiting for the drift to break something loose in me. Instead it holds my hand. A child, almost ready to let go, not ready yet. It walks with me across the brick, over the bridge, past the water I do not hear, up to the desk, into the list. I cannot shake it loose. Time does that part.
But there is one line on the list I did not make up.
The writing. Nobody assigned it. No buyer is waiting, no projection depends on it, nothing breaks if I stop. I get up for it anyway. Some mornings it is the only line on the list that pulls instead of pushes, and I sit down to the page the way I used to sit down to a room I was redoing, swatches and floor plans everywhere, hands first, hours gone before I look up. I have spent my whole life keeping things in. The writing lets some of it out. Some of what comes out is dark. It stops circling once it is on the page, and I am easier to live with on the days I write. Doug could tell you. My son cannot yet. He is the reason I want to be the man the writing is making.
When I put something true on the page, somebody writes back and says me too, and for a minute the day has a point I did not have to invent.
I am not calling it a direction. It is too early and I have been wrong before. It is a pull. I am following it the way you follow water downhill, not because you know where it ends, because it is the only thing moving.
Yesterday, on the walk back, I stopped on the small bridge outside my office. On purpose. I used to stop there once in a long while during the company years, when the noise got loud enough, and listen to the water move over the rocks. It was the closest thing I had to meditation. Then I would go back in and answer the day.
Yesterday I stood there with no day to answer, and I listened for the waterfall the way you listen for a child in another room.
It was there. It had been there the whole time, all those mornings I crossed it deaf.
Most days I still walk past it.
Some days I stop.
Here is the part I would say to someone still in it.
Right now your list writes itself. Payroll, the launch, the board, the shift. One day it will not, the sale, the layoff, the last kid, the knee, and the quiet will ask you what the day is for. So do this while the day is still spoken for. Look at your list this week and find the one line nobody assigned you. The thing you would still do if nothing required it. Circle it. Give it one protected hour a week, starting Monday. That line is not a task. It is the first entry on your next list, and if you find it early, then when the quiet comes, the first line is already written.
I found mine late. It is the only reason you are reading this.
Still in the middle.
