Found among other things, and written back.
Dear you,
I hope you’ll forgive a letter from someone you’ll never meet. I came across a few of your things the other week — a calendar with every hour boxed off, a little book promising to make me more productive before breakfast, a phrase I had to read three times: work-life balance. As though life were one weight and work another, and the trick was to keep them from tipping the table over. We puzzled over that one for a while. In the end we decided you must have loved your lives very much, to have built such elaborate machinery for protecting them from your work.
So I thought I’d write back and tell you how it turned out. Not to boast. Just so you know it was possible all along, and a good deal closer than you feared.
I woke this morning the way most people do now — slowly, and on my own. We kept the clocks, but we retired the alarm. It turned out that a sound designed to frighten you out of sleep every single day was not, on reflection, the foundation anyone wanted for a civilisation. The children walk to school, which sounds quaint until you remember it simply means the school is near enough to walk to. We didn’t invent anything to manage that. We just stopped building things so far apart.
I worked today, by the way, in case you were worried we’d all gone soft. We still make things, fix things, argue about things. But the work has an end to it, and the end is honoured, and nobody mistakes being tired for being useful. You had a word — hustle — that you said with such pride. We had to look it up. The nearest we could find was an old term for being jostled in a crowd against your will. We rather think you were onto something and just had the feeling pointed the wrong way.
The strangest thing for you would be the streets, I expect. There are people on them. Old ones, mostly, sitting where they can see what’s going on, which is the whole point of being old and you’d hidden them away from it. There’s a square near me where you will, without fail, run into someone you know, and lose twenty minutes you hadn’t planned to lose, and feel better for it. We used to call this inefficiency. Now we call it the afternoon.
We measure differently, too. You had a number — I won’t pretend to fully understand it — that went up when a marriage ended or a forest burned, because someone had to be paid to deal with the wreckage. You steered an entire planet by it. We ask simpler questions now. Do the children play outside. Can you grow old without growing invisible. Is there bread made by someone whose name you know. The questions sound almost childish written down. They turned out to be the only ones that mattered.
I don’t want to give the impression it’s paradise. It rains. People are still people — petty on a Monday, glorious by Thursday. We have not abolished heartbreak, or bad neighbours, or the particular silence of a kettle that won’t boil when you’re already late. We just stopped adding to the suffering on purpose and calling it growth. Most of the work was subtraction. We took things away — the noise, the commute, the dread that hummed under everything like a fridge you’d stopped hearing — and found a whole life waiting underneath, exactly where we’d left it.
That’s really all I wanted to say. You weren’t wrong about what mattered. You named it constantly — in those calendars, those little books, that careful phrase about balance. You were simply trying to schedule your way back to something you could have just walked to.
It was always within reach. You were closer than you knew.
With great fondness, and no small amount of gratitude,
— someone, later
Ps. Those questions have a name: the 17 Living Goals. I use them to find out where a life actually stands – starting with mine. Take the Compass, free, no sign-up.