The only way to know a world is to live there

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Strength. The whole series is here.

Late this fall will be five years since I started a three-month book leave from The Atlantic, and one thing led to another. For various reasons, I’m going through a period of reflection on that time. Here are a few of the things I think it’s been about.

When I opened to what was calling me, it didn’t come alone. // Things I couldn’t foresee in my life five years ago: Running. Becoming an ultra-distance triathlete. Taking up a pretty chunky meditation practice. Falling in love with my brilliant creative-multihyphenate partner, then stumbling into some of the hardest tests of a relationship I could imagine. Reuniting with an angelic crew of friends from a formative period (one of whom was nearing the abrupt end of his life). Writing this newsletter. I didn’t know that a homicide-suicide would tear through my family, and that all those other things would be my tools for just beginning to survive it.

Centering my imagination changed the field I was playing on. The only other five-year period of my life with a curriculum like this was the first one.

Society will almost never reward you for answering that kind of call—the one that undermines careerism, that breaks your fiduciary duty to yourself, that blurs your definition in other people’s eyes. It is a profound risk. But the openness you need to pursue an unprofitable calling returns you to a state of naive capability; you start to forget what it was you said you couldn’t do.

Devoting myself to a vision has been costly. // When I think about the salary I’ve forgone and the savings I’ve used up, this little book project of mine is pretty sure not ever to pay for itself. In other terms, it’s a boon—see above. But it has asked me to rewire the system of what I value. Sometimes the other timeline, the one where I’m a 401(k) millionaire, can feel like a taunt. Yet in the space of three months last year I watched three people close to me lose most of the time they expected to have. There are some very smart people who reckon we’re going to be the last humans. I’ve had to rethink the meaning of urgency. What is it that can’t wait?

The only way to know a world is to live there. // The other day I parted from a friend on the Lower East Side, dipped into a subway line I don’t use much, got off when my body subconsciously clicked through the right number of stops, proceeded to the correct exit without a stray glance, and walked home down streets whose parking restrictions I just happen to know by heart. On one corner I cast my eyes up at the pink and blue dusk and felt the kind of twinge you get when you see a loved one waiting for you in the baggage claim: Ah! The pink and blue sky. Good to see you, old friend, let’s get a Starbucks. That’s what living in the same city, same neighborhood, same apartment, for 14 years looks like, I guess. It’s muscle memory, implicit knowledge.

When you’re bringing ideas into this world, you’re bringing them from somewhere. When you spend time in that other place, you begin to understand what it is you need to bring back with you. You’re not going to be able to bring it all, so if that place is important, the question of what should make the trip is worthy of ample study. I think the only way you can spend too much time there is if you stop paying attention.

Write the place, disposably. Play the place on the piano. Dream it. Draw it. Look for evidence of it here, for its echoes and analogs. You’re the only person who will ever go there. It lives in you. Whether it lives in anyone else will depend on how you come to love it, and if you can convey that love.

The wrong path is right. // So many things in the last five years have not gone the way I thought they were going to go. Every time I miss a turn or forget to take detergent to the laundromat or bang my knee, I stop for a second, out of respect. The old path is gone. The new path is the path.

You’re not going to know you can do it till you do it. // I really wish everyone could do a full-distance Ironman. It’s designed to feel physically impossible, right up to the final steps. And when you find out it’s not—because here you are and there’s the finish line and it’s behind you—you realize that you’ve been living in a myth of smallness. It will never have the same hold on you again.

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