How to cope when you're stalled, panicked, and behind

They seemed baffled that I’d driven there. The highlight of my trip to the Netherlands started with three septuagenarian Dutch people standing with a clipboard in a leafy suburban yard, waving cheerfully through the window of my rental SUV. There wasn’t another car in sight.

“I’m here for the thing!” I said. “Is there…is there parking?”

They conferred amongst themselves. “Ah—” said one lady. “—We’re thinking maybe you try to leave your car by the apartments up the road?”

“Uh…will I get towed?” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s Sunday!”

This was the end point of an obsession that had started for me in the summer of 2023. That’s when Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato—a minimalist masterpiece beloved in the Netherlands and little-known everywhere else—arrived in my life like ‘Oumuamua, its glittering bars tumbling end over end through my body.

Would that I could describe to you the interstellar possibility this piece has opened for me—the whole new vistas of spacetime it’s brought into view. Suffice to say I now love it so much that when my family made last-minute plans to visit Haarlem and Amsterdam this week, the first thing I did was google around see if there was a live performance I might sneak off and see.

Holy God, was there. Simeon ten Holt died in 2012, but a foundation in his name still maintains his backyard studio as a micro performance space and artist crash pad. Little more than a shed with an 8’ grand piano and full mattress inside, it’s intermittently occupied these days by a guy named Marnix, who just so happened to be performing Canto Ostinato for the public there last weekend.

This—after illegally parking my car—is how I found myself crammed into that shed on Sunday night, my face inches from Marnix’s left arm and my back flush against a tower of ten Holt’s aging CDs. Before me on folding chairs were about fifteen other people—mostly older, all Dutch—all of whom seem to have made their way there on the wind.

Marnix, a performance artist, wore moccasins and a turtleneck and on the whole had what I would describe as Highbrow Puppeteer Aura, even though I don’t think any of his work involves puppets. He played the entire piece—the score for which is like a box full of Legos awaiting an all-new architect—virtuosically, head thrown upward in ecstasy, mouth trembling and eyes COMPLETELY CLOSED.

It was miraculous. I wept three times. I spent long stretches gazing up at Simeon ten Holt’s straw hat, still hanging from a beam on the wall. I felt his ghost in the room. And at the end of ninety minutes, as Marnix entered what I knew to be the final movements of the piece, I found myself clawing for purchase in the present, desperate to kick against the current of time.

Afterward, I had a beer with Marnix, who was delightful, and his friend the village pastor. Then I drove back to my family, windows down, blasting Canto Ostinato and whooping with joy the whole way.

I hadn’t had an adventure like that in a long, long time—and I’d forgotten how much I need adventures like that to feel alive.

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Six years ago, before 90% of you subscribed to this newsletter, I wrote about what to do when find yourself stalling, scrabbling, behind—underachieving despite your best efforts. Just about every author—and for that matter, every literary agent—goes through periods like this: scary stretches when nothing’s coming together, nothing’s working out, and nothing’s ready for prime time. You know the feeling: you’re working and working at your crops, watching your peers gather cornucopiae nearby, but no fruit seems to be materializing for you. It’s terrifying.

I’m re-running a version of that piece below. It’s the second (and for now, final) in my series of Vacation Reruns; all-new and audio posts will return next week.

You’ll see that this old newsletter contains two main pieces of advice: aim down instead of up and consider making the struggle itself your art, both of which I still believe.

In light of my concert experience on Sunday, however, I want to add one more: seek joy. Play. Stop exhausting yourself and go on an adventure. Whatever your equivalent is of cramming yourself into a shed in your favorite deceased composer’s backyard with a bunch of fellow chaotics, go do it. Find your dopamine. Find it, then feel your work break the bonds of orbit and go tumbling toward new stars.

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Originally published July 6, 2020

Nose down. Lean into the stall. Don’t fight gravity. They tell you these things on day one when you’re learning how to fly, and they’re also good advice for those of you trying to keep your publishing career aloft.