Not a career. Not a reputation. Not the kind of thing that goes on a page and is assessed by people who do not know the cost of it.
A life. An actual life, the kind that is present in its own mornings rather than managed from slightly above them, the kind that knows what it likes and takes time for what it likes and does not require those things to justify their existence in productivity terms before they are allowed to occupy an afternoon.
I am building a practice of attention.
This is the most accurate way I have found to describe what I am doing with the days. I am learning to pay attention to what is actually here rather than what should be here, to the morning as it is rather than as I planned it to be, to the conversation as it goes rather than where I intended to steer it, to the body as it arrives on a given day rather than the body I was expecting based on yesterday. The attention is the practice. The practice requires the daily showing up, which I am better at than I was, which I am still working on, which I expect to be working on for the remainder of whatever time I have, and I find that not discouraging but orienting, like having a compass direction rather than a destination.
I am building relationships that are honest.
Which means I am building relationships in which I am honest, which is harder than it sounds and requires the ongoing unlearning of the management habits, the deflection habits, the I’m-fine habits that kept me safe and kept me alone inside the safety. The relationships that are honest are the ones where someone asks a real question and I give the real answer and both of us are still standing afterward and the standing-afterward is what the honest relationship is built out of, the accumulated trust that the real answer will not destroy what we have made.
I am building toward something I cannot fully name.
That is the truest thing. I am in the building and I can feel it taking shape around me, the shape of a life that is mine in a way the previous chapters were not fully mine, and I do not have the word for what it is becoming because the becoming is still underway and the naming requires a completion I have not reached and I am not in a hurry to reach it.
Let it be underway. Let the building continue. I am here for it, finally, entirely here, and that is the whole of what I need to bring to it. That is enough to begin from. That will always be enough to begin from.
