On Choice

Involuntarily my eyes open in the grey blue light of early morning.
The first thing I see is a face. I see this face the way I first saw
it ten years ago, soft and innocent. Simultaneously, I see the face as
it is now, etched in the fine line beauty of motherhood. By my second
breath of the new day I have a choice to make.


Our second daughter was born five months ago. She smiles constantly
and sleeps soundly and I am still not sure which of these I am more
grateful for. Around the time of her birth I made the decision to step
away from the circus of social media. While the decision was a
personal one I sense my reasons for departure are shared by more and
more people every day. Social media has a Lovcraftian quality these
days — spiked tentacles lurking beneath a placid black surface waiting
to drag you under. The medium is wrought with vitriol, contention for
attention, influence over substance. What started as a way to stay
connected devolved into an abyss of the human spirit and every time I
used it I felt myself falling deeper into the pit. The choice to step
away was an easy one to make and a difficult one to execute. For all
of the poetic slings and arrows I can hurl at social media, I must
also admit that it does still serve its original purpose of keeping
people connected. I have great friends scattered across the world, the
quality of which makes it difficult to justify making new friends. So
the choice to leave social media was not just a decision to step away
from the time sucking opinion monster, it was a departure from
relationships which have defined who I am.


I did not miss it. I felt better in every way. I saw the birds.


There is a habit I have, perhaps you have it too. It goes like this,
when I experience a slight success I double down. I make more choices
in the direction of that success in an effort to amplify its effects.
After a couple of months without social media my relationships with my
wife and two daughters were the best they’d ever been. A clarity
burgeoned. It was not the first time that I could see what mattered
but somehow it was the first time I could touch it. I could feel with
my hands the slight vibration of eternity and I wanted more.


The mistake I made when I left social media was that I did not leave
social media. If you will permit me to return to my circus analogy —
Instagram is a house of mirrors, I left that attraction, made my way
out to the parking lot thinking I was home free and wound up in a long
conversation with a ventriloquist. (That’s my metaphor for Substack. I
will allow you the chance to extrapolate the meaning.) Here’s the
sticky thing about Substack: money. In less than six months I had
accumulated a considerable number of paid subscribers. I was making
more money on Substack than I had made on my previous two books. This
is where I would typically double down. This is where I would normally
affix the blinders and smash the gas.


My wife is sleeping. Her breathing is as subtle as faith. Dawn rests
around her for a moment and I consider my options. I do my best
writing at this hour with the fog still hanging languid over the
mountains, a bite in the air, a stillness that allows the timid words
to come forth fawn-like. I lay here watching her breathe for months. I
wait for her eyes. I wait for her.


I made a choice a few months ago, back in February. The one year
anniversary of the start of my Substack was approaching. Which meant
that a lot of paid annual subscriptions were about to renew, which
meant I was about to receive a decent amount of money. I had noticed
something in the weeks leading up to that anniversary. Or rather I
noticed the absence of something. Every time I sat down to write, when
my fingers touched the keyboard, that slight vibration of eternity in
my hands stopped. I could still see what mattered most but I could not
feel it. Each day when I shut my laptop, left my desk, returned home,
and lifted our newborn daughter into my arms. The feeling returned to
my hands and my heart once again beat in the steady rhythm of words
never written.


Every choice we make from the moment our eyes open in the morning has
the power to alter our course. The most subtle shift in direction
overtime has the power to change our destination. In February I made a
small choice to change every one of my founding and paid annual
subscribers to, free for life. The choice to detonate a healthy
revenue stream in exchange for an almost imperceptible sensation in my
hands was not easy to explain. Hear me out. Henry David Thoreau
famously wrote, “The price of anything is the amount of life you
exchange for it.” All of these people who have appreciated my writing
enough to pay for an annual subscription have given up just that much
of their lives in the form of work to pay, then they have invested
more of their priceless time reading what I write. You have no idea
how grateful that makes me feel, and truth be told, how unworthy at
times. So I made the choice to say thank you to those who believe in
me, who appreciate what I do well enough to exchange a bit of their
life for it. And in doing so, in returning that cost to them I have
freed myself. I have welcomed the coming dawn with inaction and am
paid in moments lived.


Our baby is awake. She does not cry. My wife takes her from the
bedside crib and places her between us. She sits up now, though
awkwardly and with a slight wobble. She sits smiling and cooing
between us in the cozy folds of a cool spring morning. There is no
place to be but here. This is my choice.

With much love and respect,

-lj