There Is a Correct Pace

 

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The soul is something like a bowl of water, and the external impressions something like the ray of light that falls upon the water. Now when the water is disturbed, it looks as though the ray of light is disturbed too, but it is not disturbed. And so, therefore, when a man has an attack of vertigo, it is not the arts and the virtues that are thrown into confusion, but the spirit in which they exist; and when this grows steady again …

— Epictetus, Discourses

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 I rounded a curve to find someone standing outside their vehicle, phone to the sky, taking a picture of a rainbow. The dense, humid air after a midday summer downpour offered up a complete double rainbow. Not something you’re guaranteed to see twice. They had the audacity to stop their car on the back road and block the lane I was driving in, to catch a moment they might never see again. How fucking dare you? Who do you think you are?

Grocery store trips are preplanned. I’ve always run them in the same counter-clockwise motion, arranged by section and aisle. If I forget something on my pass down an aisle, it’s oh well. I do without it. I don’t double back for anything.

My wife’s family is from a part of Virginia, even more rural than my hometown, which is hard to believe, and the first time I found myself in a grocery store out there, the people were blocking entire aisles to talk about the church service. They’d leave their carts in the middle of the aisle to wander. I’d hear an “Oh! I am sorry about that…” when they saw me moving their cart to the side.

I had a front-row seat as a woman inspected every single pack of chicken. My philosophy at the meat counter is simple. If the date is good. Picking through to find the right weight to save a dollar is not worth the dollar. My time is worth more than that. Driving across town for gas that’s three cents cheaper is a waste. You add ten minutes of friction to your day for what? Sixty cents.

How do people go through life wasting it? The first time I read Seneca’s line, You spend your time like you’ve got a full and abundant supply, I laughed out loud. I thought I was picking up what he was putting down. I have shit to do, real shit, and you taking your time is offending me.

My high-intensity time-management regime was applied to every part of my life. It’s in the way I organize my bathroom. It’s in the way I lay out my furniture. I figured what you gain from locking a door isn’t worth the accumulated hours you’ll spend across a lifetime fumbling for keys and hunting down fobs, so I quit locking things. If I can remove a step between me and the thing I want, I remove it. If you can’t comprehend that, then stay out of my way and leave my locks alone.

The four-way stop where everybody waves everybody else through makes me roll my neck in circles until it cracks. The person at the register who waits until the total is read aloud to start looking for their wallet elicits an audible groan. I can almost feel the stomach ulcer forming when I’m stuck in merging traffic lanes where the people each decided to be polite at the same time, and nobody gets to go. I had a feeling for all of it. WILL. YOU. JUST. MOVE. There is a correct pace. I am keeping it, and you are not.

If I think back long enough to each instance and the one before it, I end up back home as a child.

I grew up with no money. My parents bought the cheapest version of everything, in bulk. The bland bag of cereal pretending to be Lucky Charms. The trash bags that split. The paper towels pushed a mess around without absorbing any of it. Single ply.

I learned young that if you want nice things, you work harder, or you get content living at or below your means. Without a name for it, I was learning that time is money. I watched my parents work full-time jobs and come home and wipe their faces with napkins that didn’t clean anything. If they ever bought something new, we weren’t allowed to touch it, and if anything happened to it the whole house went tense for a week. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

During my teenage years, I was told that this is life, and I should get used to it. Anything I wanted to be didn’t get meaningfully encouraged. They just hoped I’d grow out of it or move through it quickly. Or they’d tell me no and lecture about starving artists and how my hobbies were a waste of time.

There has to be a better way. I told myself that before I’d ever moved out, before I’d ever tried adulting, before I knew the first real thing about any of it. Work all day so you can come home and watch TV until you fall asleep, in a too-small house full of cheap junk. I’d already decided it was pathetic. I didn’t know what life was about yet. I just knew they had it wrong.

I fell in love with building systems. Solving the problems that were in front of me gave me control of where I was and how I felt about it.

One of my first jobs was washing dishes. Packed dining room, the occasional big table in the mix, from the start of the dinner rush until the open sign clicks off. The kitchen comes looking for pans. The front of the house comes looking for glasses. Plates, bowls, cups, glasses, pots, pans, forks, knives, coming at you in a way that makes three hours feel like forty-five minutes. You don’t have time to be disorganized. You scrape, you stack, you rinse, you keep the washer humming. It only stops when you have to open it long enough to push the next tray through. Hopefully, you’ve got a couple of heads in the pit to unload. Because no matter what needs to be done, you should constantly be scraping, sorting, stacking, and rinsing.

Then cooking. In the kitchens, I learned how well a system can work. When there are a thousand things coming, you don’t treat them as individual problems. You find the fifteen or twenty movements that do the bulk of the work. And you dial them in. Sure, the last 20% is improv, but the main motions are second nature. It’s not just you, it’s the whole room. You stop thinking and you start doing. Grl Chx, Sal, Rice. Delm, M, MP. You see the ticket, and your hands already know. It’s not just what you are doing; it’s become a part of who you are.

Learn what you’re doing. Learn to do it faster. Get excellent at it. The more you can move in a given window, the more you’re worth in that window. It’s actually a very simple equation. Work harder, work faster, be better, add value.

Construction ran on the same logic, with a dollar sign stapled to it. In residential home building, the work is billed by the square foot and the linear foot. A sheet of plywood installed is a dollar a square foot. One an hour is thirty-two dollars. Four an hour is a hundred and twenty-eight. Now run that math across every material used to build a house. Build it in a month, and you make a lot more than the guy who takes two. The guy who takes three should shut down his business and come work for those of us who know what we’re doing.

The systems thinking slid right over. So did the rest of it. How do I produce the most while paying other people to do the hands-on part, and still do it well enough that nobody calls me back to fix anything? Welcome to the American dream.

Speed was the whole religion. The rate of production was the only number that mattered.

I can’t stand the look on a person’s face while they think. That pause before they hand me a sentence I could have written faster in a language I don’t comprehend. Do you mind not letting your eyes gloss over as you come up with a six-word single-syllable sentence, please? I can hear the sand hitting the bottom of the hourglass while you idle in contemplative silence.

I can run the moves out ahead of me like a chessboard. I see the mode of failure three moves out, and I will tell you how to prevent it. I told construction guys to do a thing a specific way because I’d already watched it go wrong in my head. Then I’d come back, and they’d done the exact thing I instructed them to avoid. Then I got to enjoy the privilege of signing a paycheck for it. Why did you do this? I told you what to do. Like they weren’t people. Like they were an automation tool I could set down and walk away from. I wasn’t even asking them to understand me. I just wanted them to do what I told them.

There was an irony and a reality that I didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t see. Looking back, I honestly think it was ineptitude. The contempt I felt for everyone around me came to me as an observation. I was consuming so much energy operating this way that my willpower was tapped, and I needed to find something to run on. Having someone to blame is the only way the story has any legs. The slow people didn’t just happen across my path. I put them there. I could have chosen any other way to live. But I chose this one.

I was better. I was faster. I was above. I’d found the better way, and I was standing on it. Standing over everyone around me. It’s thin air up there. It’s lonely. Nobody else likes spending time this high, so you figure you’ll go it alone, the way you always do, because nobody else would get it right anyway. You stop inviting people up. Then you stop noticing you’ve stopped.

And when the world didn’t fall into line, I expected it to. I would build my schedule as if I controlled the weather.

So here’s the life I built on top of all that. The house. The early alarm. The gym. The ice bath. A blog post I gave myself a weekly deadline on, that literally nobody reads. Clients are trusting me with projects they’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars into. A wife. A son. I’m pouring time and money into my disc golf course, trying to build it into something that runs itself, trying to do it the right way. Pressure from every direction.

And I filled every void. Every single one. Any gap that opened up from doing something more efficiently, I packed with something else to do. More speed meant more done meant I could take on more, so I did. The reward for clearing the plate was a bigger plate. I was running my whole life on willpower. I had to do everything. Be everything. Because nobody else was as good or as fast as I was, and if I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done.

Then life got loud. It all hit at once. One of our dogs has lymphoma. The steroids that were buying her time have stopped working. Our upcoming task is trying to schedule, in some morbid way, her last day.

The three-year-old decided he’s done with the crib. There was a thunderstorm. The light switch is on the outside, he told us. So now one of us has to sit in his room until he finally goes under. And if he wakes up, the betrayal of finding us gone has him screaming in the dark, and we take turns going in to lie with him on the couch until he goes back down. So now I’m folding no sleep into the rest of it.

A death you have to schedule. A fear held by a three-year-old alone in the dark. I have a system for everything, and I have absolutely no tool for either. An error on an invoice. Recovering from a medical procedure. The electricians didn’t follow the electrical diagram on the second and third floors, and my customer wants answers.

I didn’t notice the difference until it was too late, because the problems come in dressed like every other problem. Just more weight. Just more to handle. Throw more at it.

Numb. Blank. Every moment felt like I was reaching out to grab something, and it wasn’t there. A high-strung feeling sitting dead in the center of my chest, like somebody dosed me with two thousand milligrams of caffeine and left it there to hum. The rest of my body stretched in every direction at once, pulled so tight I didn’t think about food, didn’t think about water, unable to tell you the last time I’d had either. My head was empty. No thought would form even if I went looking for one. Except: something’s wrong. I don’t feel right. I need to keep moving. What is this?

There was a knot. Tight and specific, up where I think the seat of the whole thing sits. Behind the eyes. Centered about where the bridge of the nose meets the skull, but a couple of inches back. The size of a pecan. And it had a strange energy. Throbbing. Searching. Strobing. A warning? An alarm? I couldn’t find its source or shut it off.

My back stayed tight. The base of my skull felt like a hand was wrapped around the top of my neck and squeezing. Not hard enough to hurt. Just hard enough to be there. Always there. That’s how I was for days. I couldn’t breathe it away. It wouldn’t let me sleep. It was there when I held my son. It was there when I walked out into the woods to meditate. It was louder than music at any volume. It didn’t lift.

There was nowhere to put it. I’d spent years turning everyone around me into something slower, something less, something in the way. I’d climbed up into that thin air on purpose and pulled the ladder up behind me. So when whatever it was finally came, there was no person or place left for me to take it to.

I hugged my wife, hoping it would ground me. It persisted. I sat on the floor with my son so I’d be doing something real, something with love I could feel in my hands. It wasn’t fazed by him either. I had built a life with exactly one person in it. Now it was just me and this feeling. Alone in a crowded room is one thing. I’ve never really been comfortable there. I knew something was wrong when I was alone. I’ve always found comfort in solitude.

About four or five days in, I started to wonder if I’d be like this forever. I zoned into my phone for hours at a stretch. I’d wake in the middle of the night and lie there staring at the ceiling. Not sleeping. Just me and it. The morning tea had no taste. The things I looked at meant nothing. A thought would start and then drift off like a bubble, and there’d be nothing behind it.

An hour commute to the chiropractor’s office. I got in the truck and started driving. I opened the phone, tapped the GPS, and pulled up something to listen to. Then I just drove. Empty void and all. Nobody was inside of me looking out. I was operating, but as a shell. Lights on, nobody home. When I got there, I backed into the parking space on autopilot and reached over to turn off the music, or the audiobook, and I couldn’t remember which one I’d put on. I looked at the phone, puzzled. How do I not know what I just spent an hour listening to? How is that even possible? I had never actually turned anything on. The whole ride was silent with no thought. There’s a Zen line from the Diamond Sutra I know. Dwelling nowhere, mind comes forth. I don’t think this is what it means.

Something about finally accepting that I was going to be this exact kind of broken for good shook it loose enough to let me sleep a full night. The acceptance dulled the edge long enough for my exhaustion to swarm in. I woke up the next morning with a different feeling. A hesitant relief. I could pull a full breath without that weight pushing against it. My body was loose for the first time in a week. But I was and still am a little afraid that I only get one more breath before it returns.

Here’s what it was. Two different ways I’ve found to frame it. Life is problems. Some problems have a solution, and some you only navigate, and if you’re lucky, as you go, you trade up to better-quality problems. But life is not complicated. A tax return is complicated. Life is complex. A tax return you finish. You hope you got it right; the IRS tells you one way or the other, and either way, it closes. A complex thing never closes. You have a kid, and every day is new. There’s a routine under it, sure, but the routine isn’t the day. The day is whatever shows up.

I had trained myself to believe life was full of problems and that problems had solutions. So I built systems to contain and control a thing that was never going to be contained or controlled. Life on its own terms. Every single thing in every single day, too many variables to count, and I decided I’d shoulder all of it. I decided I was the only one who could carry the weight, and I decided to carry it perfectly, and I didn’t just strive for perfect. I demanded it of myself.

What I was doing was generating velocity and aiming it at a complex life, as if speed were what would crack it open. And when it didn’t, because it was never going to, I added more velocity. If I built up enough inertia, I could plow through whatever got in my way. Whatever life had to offer up.

The voids I had filled with more productivity or systems became corrupted. I began to use them to catalog what everyone else wasn’t doing, or was doing badly, and I judged them for it. I took every opening that should have been rest to step out of the natural order and into my own head. My own ego. My own order. And when the world didn’t line up with my order, I demanded it do so.

When Xerxes and his army invaded Greece, he strung boats across the Hellespont with platforms for his army to march across. A storm tore the bridge apart, and Xerxes had the strait lashed 300 times for disobeying him. A man with all the power in the world, standing on the shore, ordering the water beaten because it would not hold still for him.

I completely understand how it gets that far. Disgusted with everything that didn’t move at my same rate or bend to my will. Disgusted with life and the people living it. Disgusted with myself for every minute spent not being a better version of myself. More optimized. The world would be better if I could just have more control over the shot calling.

There has got to be a better way. If I just work harder. If I throw more of myself into it. If I can’t make it work, then it can’t be done; the rest of you shouldn’t bother trying. I’ll handle it. You’ll only get it wrong anyway.

A man whipping the sea because it had the nerve to move on its own. How’s that for pathetic?