I was looking for a photograph this morning.
Not in the abstract way that sounds when you say it. The post I published last night was about my mother, and I needed an image that could hold a certain quality of quiet without announcing it. I typed three search terms before I found what felt right. I spent eighteen minutes on this.
This started in June. I did not plan it. I was reading something I had just published and noticed the post felt like it needed air around it, not a missing fact, not a different paragraph, just a particular atmosphere that words do not quite do on their own. So I started adding images. I do not look for something literal. If a post is about waiting on an email, I am not searching for “woman staring at laptop with uncertain expression.” I look for the feeling. Window light. A table in the morning. The mood of the thing rather than its event.
This is not what a commitment device does. You do not spend eighteen minutes on the atmosphere of a spreadsheet.
The other thing I do, and nobody asked me to: I credit the photographer. Name and a link back to their work, every post. The images are properly licensed, that is not the point, I would not use them otherwise. I credit them because if I had made something and someone put it on their website, I would want them to write my name.
I have been doing this for roughly forty posts. Forty people who have no idea this blog exists, some of them photographing light through windows in countries I have never visited. I think sometimes about whether any of them has ever found the credit line. Whether they would feel something about it.
July 10. Inbox at 7:08, still quiet. Twenty-two days left in the month.
I have two contacts who have not answered follow-ups I sent weeks ago. The consulting pitch is clear. The backward map says July is for first conversations, and the first conversations have not happened yet. These are the things I am supposed to be tracking.
And I spent eighteen minutes this morning looking for the right light for a post about my mother.
I know these are not in conflict. Caring about one thing does not prevent caring about another. But I notice what I reach for when I have a spare few minutes in the morning. Not the names list. Not the pricing document. This: the image search, the credit I invented for myself, the unnamed document with eight stories and two sentences at the bottom that I keep moving to the end and not deleting.
In April, the blog was a tool I was using to build the plan. I think that was true for a while. Somewhere around the beginning of June, I cannot say exactly when, the tool started being something I was making. Not managing. Making. Attending to. Caring for in a way the plan did not require and that nobody asked me to do.
I have not figured out what that means yet. Whether “toward something” is the consulting, or the blog, or something that does not have a name yet. Doug asked that question a few weeks ago and I said “both,” which I am still examining.
What I can say is where my attention goes when I am not directing it. I think that is data. No, that is not the right word. A signal. One I have not finished reading, and I am not sure yet that I am ready to.