July 6. Inbox at 7:08. Twenty-two days in one column, fourteen in the other. The holiday weekend dissolved the way those weekends do, not fast but unevenly, and now it is Monday and I am back at the desk where I have spent roughly eleven of the last twenty-four working years.
The company I work for does not have a formal policy about Monday. We log on, or we arrive, or whatever the verb is when your commute is fourteen feet. I logged on at eight. Had two meetings before ten. Answered seventeen emails, which I know because I counted, out of a reflex I cannot fully explain.
Somewhere in all of that, I realized: Doug’s question is still here. It has been here since Saturday. I have been going about the job, and the question has been sitting in the corner of the room the whole time, waiting. Is this about leaving something, or toward something?
I said both. I still think that is the real answer, or it is the right structure of an answer, or it is a reasonable first attempt at one. I am doing less generous readings of it now that Monday has arrived and I am back at the same desk. That happens: you have a conversation that feels clarifying, and then the week starts and you are still in the same room.
Here is what I have been noticing, because I cannot let the question go. There are things I keep going back to without being directed. The document I will not name, which is eight stories now plus at least two sentences sitting at the bottom that do not fit yet. The blog. The practical post I had not planned on writing, which strangers have kept finding through search, and which I keep thinking about doing a second version of even though I have no timeline.
I keep going back to those three things. Not because they are scheduled. Not because I set a reminder. Because they pull.
The work, by contrast: I show up. I do what is needed. I have a meeting and I contribute and when the meeting is over I file it away and move on. I do not replay it in the car. I do not find myself at ten-thirty at night wanting to add one more thing to the QBR. It lands in a folder and the folder closes. I used to think that was just normal, or maybe efficient, because I have been doing it long enough that I stopped asking.
But I do replay the document. I think about it on the dog walk at seven-thirty and I am still thinking about it three hours later. I find the sentence I added on Sunday and wonder whether a different word would be more accurate. That is a different sensation than the work sensation. And it has probably been different for longer than I am comfortable admitting.
I am wondering if that is what toward looks like before you can name it. Not a destination you can point to, but a direction visible in what you keep returning to when nobody is requiring you to. I know that is a convenient thing to notice while I am waiting for two people to answer two emails that have been sitting for twenty-two days and fourteen days respectively. Convenient observations are sometimes just true things that are harder to admit than they should be.
I cannot tell those apart yet.
There is a photo that goes with this post. I have been choosing them for a few months now, a habit I picked up and did not fully think through at the time. Today’s took me maybe six minutes to find and three more to know it was right. I credit the photographer by name because that is the agreement I made when I started using other people’s images, and because I would want the credit if it were mine.
The fact that I remember those two numbers is something I am also thinking about.
Twenty-two days and fourteen days of silence. Twenty-four days left in July.
I said both, and I believe I meant it. What I keep noticing is that among the things I return to when no one is making me, the job is not one of them. Whether that is the toward I could not name three days ago, I cannot yet say. I am starting to think it might be.