Sunday is the wrong day to wait for an email.
I know this. The email I sent Thursday afternoon would not get a response on a weekend. The people who might respond are going to do it Monday or Tuesday, when they are back in their inboxes and something surfaces and they have a minute to reply. Checking on a Sunday is not waiting. It is just refreshing for its own sake. I know this, and I checked once this morning anyway. The habit does not care about logic.
What I did after that was open the unnamed document.
This is the document I have been adding to since June. Eight stories and a note from a 2017 meeting I added last week. I do not call it anything. I do not know what I would call it. I just keep going back to it, and it keeps having more in it than I remember, and I always feel slightly caught out when I open it, like I walked into a room and found more furniture than I thought I owned.
The stories are about a pattern. Specifically: the pattern of seeing something early in a client conversation or a meeting or a dinner, and holding the observation quietly while the situation still had time to go differently. Then watching it go exactly the way I had seen it would go. The document is eight versions of that story. I did not know they were the same story until I had written four of them.
At the bottom there are two sentences I cannot finish. I have started them twice. I delete the ending both times.
I spent part of this morning trying to understand what I am waiting to know.
The first sentence starts with something about what the noticing is for. The stories are about seeing things early. They are not about what you do with what you see. I have not written that part, because I am not sure I know the answer. Maybe you see things clearly and the seeing is the value, and that is all there is to say. Maybe there is something that comes after the seeing that I have not named yet. I cannot tell from the inside.
The second sentence is worse. It starts: “Which is why.” And then I stop. Every time.
I know roughly what the sentence wants to say. It wants to say something about what happens on the other side of this. What the noticing pattern does when the person doing the noticing is no longer inside an institution that hands her things to notice. Whether the pattern survives the absence of the container. I think the honest version of the sentence is something like: I do not know yet. Which is not really a sentence you can end a document with, if the document is supposed to be about how something works.
So the sentences sit there. I come back, look at them, close the document.
What I did instead of finishing the sentences was put something in August. Not a calendar entry, not yet. A note: August 4, first Tuesday, pick the next name, write the email. I have been calling August the month I reach out to the rest of the list since sometime in July, which is the kind of plan that sounds like a plan and isn’t until there is a date in it. August 4 is not yet in my calendar. It is in a note. I know the difference. But it is more specific than the word “August,” which is what I had before.
The gap between a note and a calendar entry is smaller than it used to feel. I cannot tell you exactly when that changed.
The two sentences are still at the bottom of the document. I will go back to them. What I cannot yet answer is whether I am waiting to learn what I need before I write them, or whether writing them is part of how I learn it. I suspect the second. I am not ready to test the theory.
Fifteen Sundays now. My mother is not going to ask first.