High-Speed Drift Into Nowhere

My hands were actually shaking.

I was sitting in the UCCU Center at my youngest daughter’s high school graduation, before commencement had started, playing Blockudoku on my phone with my youngest child beside me. We were one “Choose carefully” block away from an all-time high score.

That afternoon was supposed to be a capstone. Instead it felt like the closing ceremony on a month that had already exacted as much from me as I could give.

In the weeks leading up to it, my fledgling business ran out of cash. I had grown payroll way ahead of revenue, certain I could secure new investment in time to keep the plane flying. I couldn’t. I had paid my team well which shortened the runway and, when the runway ended, meant I had to let 80% of them go. The rest stayed on as unpaid volunteers for thirty days to see if we could right the ship. That says something about the people we hired, and about paying people well enough that they had room to breathe when the money ran out.

To keep my family’s finances stable, I took a long-term consulting gig that consumes most of my days, pushing work on my faltering business to the edges of mornings and nights. I’m not giving up on what I’m building, but my family needs financial oxygen too. Relief and grief, opportunity and failure. You can hold both without trying to resolve them neatly.

I buried my aunt DeAnne, one of my closest friends for twenty years. Some rooms slow time down. The estate doesn’t. Paperwork keeps the same cruel pace as email.

Our children are entering new chapters of their own. One graduated. Another is preparing to leave the country. Another is preparing for a demanding future of her own. I am supposed to be the steady one. Some days I am. Some days I am a man chasing a high score between phone calls.

The final block landed. Score: 4,021. A new high score, even though the placement ended our game.

It doesn’t matter whether the thing is a game, a show, or an app. They’re all symptoms of the same type of drift: velocity with no destination.

My month wasn’t uniquely cursed. My wife and I say it all the time: so many people are carrying so many hard things at once, none of them pausing for the others to finish. The list was unsettling. So was the speed we moved through it. By comparison, the distractions required almost no effort.

I’ve worked in warehouses much of my career. When a facility runs too fast for too long, people stop seeing the building. They see the never-ending task list and the alarms. That was my month. Alarm after alarm. I don’t think I’m the only one squinting at blinking lights instead of being present in the room I’m standing in.

John P. Weiss put it better than I can:

These quiet moments are the fraying threads of something ancient and beautiful. We walk past them every day, barely noticing that the landscape of our lives is being flattened out, smoothed over, and tucked away, leaving only a faint, phantom vibration in the air.

After a whirlwind trip to the East Coast to meet potential investors, I came home with no answers but plenty of hope. At least once an hour I would reach for my phone, sure I’d missed the call or email with a term sheet. Those messages never came. In the meantime: funeral arrangements, cleaning DeAnne’s place for sale, legal documents to act as her trustee, year-end concerts, investor follow-ups. There was urgency in everything I did, but no payload.

It was Friday morning, two days before DeAnne passed. My son and his wife walked into her hospital room. He had worked for me for almost two years. I had let him go the afternoon before, along with most of the rest of my team. All he did was make eye contact with me. I broke. My little boy— suddenly a twenty-two-year-old man, taller than I am—sat on that uncomfortable hospital bench and held me while I sobbed.

As Mr. Weiss said in the same article, “You can’t perfume a text message.” You can make it longer. You can add exclamation points. You can’t give it the same weight as someone in the room with you with their arms around you while you cry.

That’s what hectic does. It’s not the same as hard. The month was hard and hectic. Hectic is unranked urgency, where every chime from your phone is treated with the same priority and every task marked hot to the point where nothing really is. I cared about what was happening. I still let speed steal moments that couldn’t be rescheduled: a quiet evening with my wife, who has carried more of this than I have words for; an hour of silence with a book; the commencement exercises I was physically present for and mentally somewhere else.

Blockudoku is avoidance with okay graphics and the smoothest kind of nowhere.

It’s interesting. “The way things were” lingers on the fringes of our lives. Most of the time, we’re moving at the wrong speed and miss it. There’s a kind of deliberate effort required in life today that was just the norm twenty years ago.

Here’s Mr. Weiss again:

There are still vestiges of the old world lurking in the corners if you embrace the art of noticing. They are quiet invitations. Asking us to slow down, to remember, and to embrace the simpler ways.

Simple life is hard today. However, a return to simple attention doesn’t have to be.

When I came home with nothing to report from the investor trip, I paid attention to how my wife held my hand. I really saw my daughter in her cap and gown as she made her way across the stage and when we took pictures outside. I came to know DeAnne a little better through the little things we were cleaning from her condo: proof that our lives accumulate in cards, trinkets, and stories that have no intrinsic value.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a problem solver. Life, though, isn’t really a problem to be solved. Today, I have a consulting contract, a grieving family, a business that still matters to me, and a high score that I’m trying not to care about.

DeAnne would tell me to keep going, but not with reckless abandon. She was a person who didn’t confuse speed with devotion.

The drift—maybe it’s a pull—toward nowhere is so real, but so is the road of life. We always have to keep moving but we don’t need to pretend that every movement must be forward either.

There’s no way to wrap the last five weeks in a bow. It’s still chaotic and messy. My office is covered in things that I must do something with. For now, I can choose two simple, honest things: Blockudoku stays deleted, and when I’m in the room, the people who are there are the main event.

You can’t perfume a text message, but you can show up.