You’re Not Too Busy

I left you with a question a week ago.

What would I want if nothing were wrong?

You felt something move when you read it and told yourself you would sit with the question.

And then you didn’t.

I don’t treat that as a failure, and it might be the most valuable thing that’s happened to you in a long time.

Where this leaves us

My first piece in this series said you don’t move because moving requires a death. Some version of you has to be buried, and nobody volunteers to grieve in advance.

The second piece said you will resist this death because what you’re moving toward is too small. The want came out of a wound, and a wound only asks to be healed.

So the obvious next step is to go find a bigger desire.

But a bigger desire can’t arrive from simply asking the question.

It will arrive when you enter a room you have never visited.

I flew across the world for two hours

For two and a half years, I worked with Steve Hardison, who only sees clients in person.

So wherever I was in the world, I flew to him, sat for two hours, and flew home.

Every two weeks.

On paper, that is an absurd way to spend two hours.

Except the session wasn't the product. The trip was.

Eventually I understood this.

Without meaning to, I built a ritual. An entire day whose only purpose was getting there. Hours in the air with nothing to do but turn over what I was bringing him.

Whatever I carried onto the plane, I landed halfway to the answer.

And whatever the two hours opened, the travel home closed.

Give me the same two hours on video, no flight, no lost days, and I would have gotten a fraction of it.

The two hours in his office weren’t the teacher. The time I couldn’t escape was.

Why you never take the time

You didn’t avoid the question last week because you were lazy, or shallow, or too busy to care.

You skipped it because you are never not busy. And that is not an accident.

At first glance, a full life looks like a burden. Look again, and it is a defense against dying.

Every fire to put out. Every message to answer. Every good and urgent reason to fill the day to the edges.

All designed to keep you out of the single room where the old version of you has to die.

You think you are protecting your time from the world.

You are using the world to protect yourself from the question.

The stretch

Set aside thirty minutes to think about your life, and you will spend all thirty cleaning up your to-do list.

The unanswered email. The thing you said in the meeting. The call you’re avoiding.

Nothing begins until the to-do list is empty, and this always takes longer than you think.

After distraction comes boredom, which most people read as proof something is amiss.

But boredom is the doorway that appears the moment the busyness runs out, and there is no one left to be but you.

Everything worth having is on the other side of it.

You can’t get there in a slot. You get there in a stretch.

Not because the count of hours is magic. Because a stretch is long enough that you can’t schedule your way around the part where the old self starts to go.

A man who wanted it and still couldn’t enter the room

I offered a client a half day recently. Come out, spend four hours, build the next twenty years of your life.

He didn’t resist. I wasn’t selling him anything he didn’t already want.

Then he put it four weeks out, into the one gap on his calendar where it would cost him nothing. After a wedding. Before a trip he’d had booked for months.

Read that carefully. He isn’t a man who failed. He’s doing it, and he’ll do it well.

He is a man who wanted this immediately, and still could not find a place for it until a slot appeared that asked nothing of him.

That isn’t weakness.

That is what a full life does to a question this big. It never lets it get quiet.

So assume you won’t protect this time on your own. The hours have to become ordinary, not exceptional.

Prescribe the conditions, not the content

Here is my only instruction about what to do inside the time.

Nothing.

I’m not going to hand you a worksheet. The moment I do, you’re answering my questions instead of finding yours.

Set the conditions and leave the content alone.

Four hours. One block. On the calendar, with a name on it.

Away from your home or office. Somewhere that doesn’t already have a version of you in it.

Phone off and away. Not face down.

Paper.

No agenda beyond the one question.

That is the container. What happens inside it is yours.

Now it’s your turn.

Don’t answer these questions here. Take them into your calendar block.

What would I want if nothing were wrong?

What have I been calling impossible that is only expensive?

Who would I be in twenty years if I stopped asking what’s realistic?

What did I already know before I sat down that I’ve been declining to hear?

That last one tends to arrive somewhere in the third hour. It waits until the busyness is gone, because it needs you to have nowhere else to be.

Now go put the block on the calendar. Not this quarter. This month.

The version of you that keeps the days full will have a reason it can’t.

Let that be the tell, not the verdict.

Loving you,

Townsend