I've been meaning to write this letter for weeks. I kept thinking I'd do it when things slowed down. You see the problem.
There's a version of the life I want to be living that I keep deferring to some calmer future that never quite arrives. And I suspect you do this too — not because you're lazy, but because you're serious, and serious people like to wait for the right conditions. We think we're being careful. We're mostly just postponing.
Philosophy — by which I mean: thinking carefully about how to live — is not something you fit in around the rest. It's the rest that has to wait.
The trouble with interruptions is that they don't come one at a time. You clear one thing and two more are already forming behind it. You clear those and the original thing has come back in a different shape. I'm not describing your life — I'm describing mine. The inbox doesn't empty. Neither does the week.
What I've noticed is that the people who seem genuinely at peace aren't the ones who finally got the time. They're the ones who stopped treating their inner life as a reward for finishing everything else. Their steadiness comes from inside and doesn't depend on circumstances cooperating. It sounds like a cliché until you actually see it in someone, and then it's the most striking thing in the world.
Happiness that depends on things going well is just well-dressed anxiety.
I'm not there yet. I slip around. Some days I'm clear and some days everything external gets in and sloshes around and I lose the thread. But I'm more convinced than I used to be that the slipping is what happens when I've been neglecting the work — the quiet, interior work that can't be done in gig or rush or squeeze. It needs a little stillness. Not much. Just enough.
So: don't wait. Not for the weekend, not for the move, not for when this project ends. The conditions will never be right. Begin now, badly if you have to, briefly if that's all you have.
With love,