NEWSLETTER vol. 5

A former coworker retired over the winter. He'd put in his time, he had plans, he was going to travel, slow down, get to the things he'd shelved for thirty years. This past week his wife passed. Whatever version of his life he'd built in his head for after work is gone. What's left is the version nobody plans for.

I keep landing on the same sentence when I think about it. Time waits for none of us. Not as something to say. As something that happened to a man I used to work alongside, who did everything right, who waited for the right moment to start living the life he wanted, and then the moment used itself up before he got the chance.

Identity, and process have been sitting under everything else this week. I've been learning to run the plant under the front four sheets one module at a time, and there's a temptation in that kind of work to treat it as preparation. Module one, then module two, then someday I'll actually know what I'm doing. Someday I'll be the guy who runs the rink instead of the guy who's still learning it. The process isn't the runway before the identity. It is the identity. I'm not learning to become the person who understands this system. I'm becoming him one gauge reading at a time, this week, and next, not after module twelve.

That's the piece that connects. My old coworker did the runway version. Work now, live later. He wasn't wrong to plan that way, most people do, but the story only works if later shows up on schedule. It doesn't ask permission. It doesn't wait for the plan to finish.

So the question I keep asking myself this week isn't whether the rink job or the writing or any of it will pay off eventually. It's what I'd be waiting on if I decided to wait. There isn't a good answer. Anything worth doing is worth doing now, not because later doesn't exist, but because nobody gets a guarantee that it will.

Music this week: Cat Power, Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert - a full recreation of Dylan's legendary acoustic and electric sets, recorded live. Fitting for a week about identity and process. An artist inhabiting someone else's songs so completely that the "cover" argument stops mattering. Apple Music | Spotify

Thanks for reading. See you next Monday.