Sunday from the Porch

As Soon As

There’s a phrase I keep hearing. Two of them, actually. They travel in pairs.

“As soon as” and, “If only.”

A friend and I were on the phone a few weeks ago, talking about the lives we’re building. Or more honestly, the lives we keep meaning to build. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, we started naming the ways we stall ourselves out. The mechanisms are almost always the same. As soon as I finish this project… As soon as the money is right… If only I had more time… If only I’d started sooner…

We set horizon lines for ourselves and then we swim toward them. And most of the time, we drown in the way out. From the boredom in wading. From the weight of the self-imposed grief. From the self-doubt that serves as the current that keeps pulling us in different directions. Or worse, looking back to shore (How far am I?), we form an identity. I’m almost there. I’m the person who almost did that. And all the while the horizon keeps moving, because it was never a real place to begin with.

I hung up the call and walked to my laptop and published something big that I’d been sitting on. No plan. No runway. No waiting for that kismet inquiry or for the stars to align. And just like that, the things I’d been turning over for weeks months suddenly moved from the column of eventually into the column of done.

Something shifted in that conversation, and I think it was this: I stopped needing the thing to be permanent before I let it exist.

I caught myself thinking, at the end of the day, if it doesn’t stick, it could just be a campaign. And that was enough. That small framing (almost offhand) released something. Because a campaign has a beginning and an end. It doesn’t have to become anything other than what it is. It can be a real thing, a complete thing, without needing to be a forever thing. And if it turns into something more, great. But that’s not the condition of its existence.

I’ve started thinking about this as a kind of pro-temporary lifestyle. Finding comfort in letting things live as projects, as campaigns, as ideas in motion. Until they’re not. Until they either materialize into something real and lasting, or they run their course and fade. Both outcomes are fine. Both are honest.

I didn’t always feel this way. Two years of continuous travel has a way of adjusting your relationship with permanence. You stop expecting things to hold still. You start noticing how much time you spent waiting for permission. From circumstances. From readiness. From some version of yourself that was always just around the corner. The world moves. Seasons change. Cities feel different the second time around, and you realize it’s not the city that changed.

What I know now… What I really know now, in the way you only know things after you’ve lived them, is that there’s no time or reason to wait. Things are either going to be or they’re not going to be. That’s not nihilism. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the most honest argument for doing the thing right now, today, with what you have, that I’ve ever come across.

The horizon line doesn’t move any closer no matter how long you swim. But the water right here, where you’re standing, that’s real. That’s yours.

Might as well start here.