Monday, 5th October 2026

I spent the better part of the last two years trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

Since getting sick, it's been hard to locate the edges. What was I capable of sustaining anymore? Every time I made progress, some major system would go awry, and I'd either feel too awful to work, be constantly tied up with doctors, tests, and procedures, or both.

Halfway into 2026, however, I started noticing that the year had been different. I was feeling better (still in pain daily, but I don't think that's ever going away), all systems were humming, and I had a lot more energy.

I started working on a specific project that I thought was "it," and for once in a long time, I felt like I was actually making inroads for the next chapter—and it was solid ... until it wasn't.

I had just reached the point of launching the thing and suddenly found myself not wanting to work on it. What the? I finally get to a place where I can actually do something (health-wise), and now I don't want to do it? Really?

But was that it? Was it that I didn't want to do it? Maybe that wasn't the issue.

I liked the work. In fact, I'd picked it precisely because it was something I felt I could spend all day doing.

So what was it then?

I found myself fighting the urge to blow the whole thing up. But I'd done that a hundred times before. This was as close and as good as anything.

So I left it alone for a while, not working on it (but also not launching it), while I tried to figure out what the actual problem was.

In my last letter, I mentioned a quote by Thomas Merton:

Wasted motion. That was it. Well, it wasn't exactly it, but I suspected the years of accumulation of wasted motion around what I was going to do (and what was possible) certainly didn't help.

I'd made thousands of stops and starts.

Maybe this was the thing I was supposed to do.

Or maybe that.

I'd pass myself on the way to something else, and then have to double-back.

Manically, I tried to find something I felt I could love and sustain—and it wasn't working, and I'd done this for years, decades even.

Yet, if I got still and quiet, or if I let one thing go and then thought back on it sometime later, I could always see that (a) I did, in fact, like that thing, just as well as anything else, and (b) all I would have had to have done was stick with it long enough to see it through to success.

More than either of those things, though, I was never going to find one business, one relationship, one house, one town, one anything that was absolutely, 100% perfect 100% of time, or that I loved—or even liked—100% of the time.

Of course, the logical side of my brain knew that, right, but we don't make decisions from our logical brains. We make decisions from fear, avoidance, boredom, restlessness, mania, the need for survival, and a whole slew of other things, but rarely logic.

Either way, I'd burned myself clear out, to the point that I didn't even have enough mania or restlessness to goad me on anymore.

So I asked myself a single question: What would I do if it didn't matter? Not because I didn't want my work and life to matter. That was actually the exact point, I wanted them to matter too much. Anything I worked on needed to be "significant" or significantly helpful. The bar was just too high.

So then, what would I do if it didn't matter?

I'd been actively avoiding the thing I deep down wanted to do. It was the simplest of things, which was at least part of the reason I thought it wasn't valuable—it was just too simple, and my mind kept mistakenly equating "simple" with "insignificant."

Again, the logical side of my brain knew was not true. Often the simple things are the things we remember, the things that matter to us most, and the things we crave most desperately. We've just been taught to not value them so that we can prioritize actually not valuable things (buying stuff, obsessing about money, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, whatever it is we do with our time).

I was getting a biopsy done a month or so ago. Mid-procedure, the radiologist asked if anyone was there with me. I said, yes, that my husband was outside. She said he could have come in with me. I said that it was okay, he was going to find a tree to park under, roll the windows down, and read a book. One of the other technicians or nurses said, in a sing-song voice, "Oh, that sounds nice. I would love to just go sit under a tree and read." I said, "You should. Maybe on your lunch break." The radiologist piped in and said, "It must be nice to have the time to just sit under a tree and read."

I don't think she meant it disparagingly (but how sad that we've gotten to a point where that would be a common or expected response). Either way, the irony wasn't lost on me. Here my husband and I are, life interrupted by the prospect of cancer, and since we have no real choice but to be at this hospital, we are forced into "down time" so much that we have time to sit under a tree and read.

But that wasn't even my initial thought. My initial thought was, "Here I am facing the prospect of cancer, and we're saying the things we'd actually love to have time to do somewhere in our days, and none of us can see how messed up our priorities might be."

Trust me when I tell you, though, as soon as I got the all-clear, I was back cramming my days just as full as I suspect that hospital team did (or does), and I imagine someone in that waiting room got bad news that day. In the words of Tim Kreider, we learn nothing.

Now that I think about it, maybe that was the start of it.

My journal entries stop at June 29 and don't pick up again until September 8, the exact time I was learning and dealing with the news.

Somewhere in there, the question came to me: What would I do if it didn't matter? The Paper Abbey was my response.

There's a line of a Colin Hay song I love: "On a clear day, I can see, see for a long way."

— A.
Founder & groundskeeper
The Paper Abbey

P.S. Unironically, the title of the song is "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin."

Reference notes:
Let's call this letter "What would you do if it didn't matter?" in the letter archive, and I'll file it under attention, simplicity, and meaningful living.