It’s July 3rd. Inbox at 7:08: nothing new from either direction. Eighteen days and ten days, which is now just the number I carry around.
I have a long weekend. Half-day today, Monday is a holiday, Tuesday is when this resumes. The work calendar is quiet. That should mean something. It used to.
I have historically been very good at this. Turning the job off. Not in a “I practice boundaries” way, more in a simple mechanical way: close the laptop on Friday, stop thinking about pipeline, come back Tuesday. Colleagues used to comment on it, which always struck me as a low bar for commentary, but they kept doing it. “Leigh, how do you just not think about it over a long weekend?” I would say something about compartmentalization. What I did not say was that the not-thinking-about-it was possibly a symptom of not caring as much as I was supposed to.
Long weekends have always been structurally simple for me. The job pauses. I pause the job in return. We don’t miss each other.
What I have noticed is that this particular long weekend will probably work the same way, on the job side. Max has a lacrosse thing tomorrow morning. I will go to it and not check email during it, because I am a person who does not do that, even though the person next to me in the camp chairs sometimes does and I have never fully understood it. There will be a grill involved at some point. Doug will manage the grill with the quiet authority of a man who knows exactly one thing he is unambiguously in charge of, and I will not argue with this.
The job will pause. The other thing has no pause button.
I don’t mean I will spend three days productively executing some consulting plan. That’s not quite it. I mean I will be standing there Saturday night and a sentence will occur to me. I’ll be in the car and hear the way someone phrases something on the radio and think: I need to find a version of that. I will put Max’s lacrosse game into my memory in a specific way that is not about lacrosse, and I will have filed it away before I realize I’m doing it.
I have been doing it since day one. I didn’t start doing it on purpose. I noticed at some point that I was.
The question from yesterday, which I did not resolve because I don’t have the answer: did the writing teach me to notice things I was previously explaining away, or was I already shifting and the blog is just where it goes?
I said I suspected the second. I am trying not to give myself the flattering interpretation.
But the data point I keep coming back to: the job has always had an off switch. I have always used it. Something you care about less than you’re supposed to is very easy to pause. Something you care about, without quite having chosen it yet, is not.
I have not decided if that means I have made something I care about, which would be the good interpretation. Or if I have simply traded one thing that kept me up at night for another. Both are possible. The difference matters and I cannot tell yet which one it is.
Doug will probably ask about the weekend tonight. I’ll tell him: Max’s thing, the grill, some writing. He’ll ask if I mean the blog. I’ll say yes. He’ll nod in the way he nods when he has decided not to ask his follow-up questions.
He has three of them, is my guess. I have been watching that nod for about six weeks and I keep not asking what’s behind it.
Maybe this weekend I will.
The inbox has eighteen days in one column and ten in the other. July still has twenty-seven days in it. The backward map still requires conversations to happen this month.
I am going to close the work laptop at noon. The other one I already know I’m going to open. I am not entirely sure yet what to make of that.