A Symphony of Things I Can’t Do

When it takes decades to notice a problem and months or more to solve it.

The metaphor:

I wrote last week about my early 20s. This week, I’m back in my late 30s, sorting out new ideas and the questions that arise behind them. Both the questions and their answers are a part of learning, but the questions can be so destabilizing that the answers’ arrival feels like a welcome rescue.

The story:

This past Friday, during the time I’d blocked for my run, the internet suddenly became irresistible. It felt important that I take in all the New York Times headlines, then survey the impact on real people via LinkedIn. Just as the lights in my conscious mind were starting to flicker out, giving over to the unthinking scroll, a thought broke through: “Instead.” As in, “I am doing this instead of running.”

This single word was so simple, yet so clear, that it felt like divine intervention. Then it struck me that I’d just turned 39 last weekend: it was a new year. Oh my god, I wondered. Is this going to be a year that answers?

Back in 2022, I heard Zora Neale Hurston’s quote, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer," and it felt like validation. 2021 had raised big questions. I’d grappled with my self-conception, moving to a rural place, away from friends, and to my confusion, liking it. Meanwhile, at work, I’d scrambled to absorb new responsibilities after my boss left, and it took months to metabolize the constant sense of pressure.

By the time I heard the quote, I had turned 36 and started to wrap my arms around my new life context. Then, too, a single word had suddenly struck me: “Yet.” As in, “I don’t know how to do this job YET,” or, “I’m not used to living here YET.” Adding this one small word to each sentence turned the problems I’d been struggling with into stages I was passing through. It introduced a sense of faith that while I didn’t have the answers, they would come.

This mindset shift felt enormous. I remember writing “yet” across a whole page in my journal, the word as big as my gratitude for the new baseline of confidence. When I heard the Hurston quote, I knew what it meant to have answers brought to me. I didn’t have all the answers, but I’d recently found a few to resolve questions that had rocked me – who am I, what can I do, even how can I sleep better. I was proud to have emerged with new perspective.

I more or less held onto that feeling throughout 2022 and 2023. No setbacks unsettled me at the level of 2021 or asked as much of me as 2020. New thoughts or insights reinforced my sense of being in answer mode, bringing the quote to mind. Then my birthday came in early 2024, and so did new big questions.

The first was whether it was time to leave my job. This was a big one, after four years and a move upstate. Still, while leaving felt like the end of an era, it didn’t make me have to rethink anything. It had been a great fit and it was time to move on. I was grateful for the time I’d spent and to be able to leave on good terms.

The rethinking came from my assumption that time between jobs would feel like the week between Christmas and New Year’s, where “there’s almost nothing that needs to get done and there’s time to do a lot.” I thought that with no job, there would be time to do everything I wanted. So I started brainstorming: how did I want to spend my time?

I was excited to be able to redirect the hours and energy that had gone to work. I was keenly attuned to what I could be doing at my job, all the time – overflowing with ideas for improvements, new projects and messages. On a run, I often pulled out my phone to record voice notes of ideas for the next working day. Disconnecting was hard: “I’d often stay online an extra hour or two or three, if I hadn’t gotten through my task list and my plans allowed for it.” If I didn’t have plans, I didn’t think about what I was losing by giving time to work.

I suspected I was overlooking something, though I wasn’t even sure what. Using a framework my mom had shared called the Wellness Wheel, I started making lists for June 2024. I brainstormed ways I could spend time in nature, in creative pursuits, in revisiting my values and spirituality, in rest and relaxation. I thought about what relationships I wanted to seek out, deepening new friendships and reconnecting with people from the past. Did I mention that I genuinely thought there would be time to do all this?

Well, there was not, and suddenly I was facing a problem of my own making. The same way my work exuberance had turned to pressure, I had turned my free time into a too-big task list of new things I now felt like I should be doing. It was humbling and irritating to have such clear proof that the biggest stressors of working had come not from the job, but from me. Leaving the job did not mean leaving these habits.

I had found too many answers to the question, How do I spend time? So throughout the summer, I had to confront the next question: How do I choose between them? It was exciting to suddenly have so many options, but hard to explain to myself or others what I was actually getting done – and why it wasn’t more. Why wasn’t I working on the Kamala Harris campaign, and also writing a book, but also spending more time with my grandma? I remember lying in bed at night, feeling genuinely happy about what I’d done, but a gnawing sense of loss or regret about what I hadn’t.

By October ‘24, I still hadn’t figured it out. I called a friend and confessed that I was stressed about not getting to all the kinds of fun I wanted to have. She laughed. “I just think you have to rewrite the expectation that you can be in all those areas in any given day,” she told me. “Then instead of feeling “behind,” you can use the sense of what you’re missing to inform where you focus next. Like, look for balance in a given week or month, not a day.”

I’ve been holding on to that idea for these past five or so months since then, testing out what it feels like to take a lack as instructions for the future rather than a failure of the past. I think this is why it takes whole years to get answers: these are questions that have to be lived into, worn down and turned over through time. They’re not about logic or logistics. They’re about how to hold your mind and body in the world. They’re the big questions that I find myself unearthing now that I’m sitting in the middle of the table.

I felt lucky to get to ask myself these questions. Beyond the obvious luxury of taking time off between jobs, it I’ve only gotten to these questions by going through the last few years’ answers. Articulating what I don’t know is a sign of progress just as much as articulating what I do. Still, having answers solidify beneath my feet feels a lot better than having questions send me out to sea. So, when Instead arrived this week, I greeted it like a life raft, throwing myself on board.

Now that I’m back at work, I don’t feel as under water as I did over the summer. I’ve been employed again for almost as long as I was unemployed, and the structure is back in my day to day. Still, even back at my desk, I feel different about time. I no longer feel like time without plans is time I can give to work without loss. I still have all those lists in my mind of creative, outdoorsy, social and intellectual ways I’d like to spend my days.

That’s what Instead means: that now, I feel the tradeoffs. Whether it’s mindless scrolling instead of exercise, like on Friday, or working late instead of reading a book, or calling a friend instead of taking a hike, I am aware of the other, wonderful ways I could be spending time. Since we moved upstate, I’ve been building out my hobbies, (re)discovering these individual options of how to spend time: hiking, paddle boarding, writing, reading. But until last summer, they didn’t come to mind unbidden, the way my work task list did: I had to go looking for them, asking what should I do now? Now, I can hear them all, all at once: a symphony of things I can’t do all of.

There’s an element of loss to what I won’t do, but for me, it’s outweighed the deliberateness of the choice I can make. Instead has been happening the whole time, without my noticing. But because I asked the question last summer, I’ve learned to hear a much fuller breadth of options, all the time. And after a year of working through it, I can say its name.

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