You close the laptop and cannot say where the day went. You’re tired, tired of being tired, and if someone asked what you actually did since breakfast you’d have to open your browser history to answer. Forty tabs. A half-written email. A comparison of two nearly identical kettles that you did not buy.
There was nothing dramatic or significant that took place. That’s the part I find hardest to accept. I could forgive a crisis. What happened instead is that the hours drained out through the small holes, too small to notice at the time, so I’ve started keeping an informal list of the holes, because they repeat.
Motion is the big one. The constant movement, switching between tasks, refreshing inbox driven by a belief that a person in motion must be getting somewhere. She looks busy. She feels busy. But if you stopped her mid-scroll and asked what she was building, she’d have nothing. I’ve tried this on myself at unflattering moments and the answer is genuinely nothing, there is no project the movement serves. The remedy I use is dull. One breath before opening the next thing, and the question of what matters most right now.
Then there are the wants that were installed. A decent portion of what you want on any given day came in through a feed: the machine noticed what held you, served more of it, and after enough repetitions the wanting felt like taste. I did not decide to care about a particular style of Japanese kitchen knife. I was taught to, over about six weeks, by a recommendation engine and I looked at it for 3 seconds too long. Now it is all I see, needless to say, I never wanted a Japanese knife. When you sit in a quiet place with the phone off and ask what you actually need today produces a very different list. It’s short. Sleep is usually on it. The knife never is.
The sunset one you know very well. Good light arrives over the ridge and the hand moves toward the phone before anything you could call a conscious thought occurred. I’m interested in what changes once the phone is out. You start composing. You are somewhere in the evening’s production department now rather than in the evening, and the strange proof is that you can photograph a sunset and afterwards have no memory of watching it. I’ve been trying to leave the phone in my pocket and let the things go unrecorded.
Add to the basket. Some purchases are barely about the item. You’re uneasy and the thing waiting at checkout carries a promise: of a slightly happier you. She’s calmer. Her cupboards make sense. The purchase never quite delivers so a few days later there’s a new basket with a new way to happiness. I’ve stopped trying to argue with the urge directly. What works is postponing it, closing the tab and walking out to do something with the hands, or calling a friend, and then checking whether the want is still there in the morning. Mostly it isn’t. The unease is, but the unease was never going to fit in a basket anyway.
The last one isn’t a leak. It’s the thing the leaks are for.
Five minutes of sitting still, phone in another room, doing nothing. I resisted writing this down because it sounds like advice, and worse, like the kind of advice printed on tote bags. When the noise stops, something comes up. The conversation you owe someone. A decision you’ve been feeding to busyness so you don’t have to make it.
All these simple things, help us to catch the leak while it’s leaking, name it. Then I decide what to do with it.
