Hi, it’s Brilliant.
A few years ago, I finished a 9,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It took me twenty-two months.
Almost every time I sat back down at that table, I’d find pieces that fit right away. Three, four, five of them in the first few minutes. And I’d think: why didn’t I place those last night? They were right there. They were easy.
Then I’d remember. Last night I was tired. I’d been staring at blue ocean and pieces of fish for more than an hour and my eyes had stopped seeing. Fatigue is real. But so is coming back fresh.
I’ve been thinking about that lately because of my desk. And my inbox. And a particular stack of paper that has sat around long enough to have its own mailing address. Clutter is something I’ve lived with for a long time. For most of that time I’ve treated it as just how I am.
But “just how I am” is a story. My training as a coach taught me that much: the stories we tell at the identity level are the ones we’ve stopped questioning. This was one of mine.
And not only mine. My mom saved things “in case they might be useful,” a habit she learned from her mother, who came through the Great Depression keeping newspaper clippings, fabric, anything that might one day serve someone.
Here’s what strikes me when I actually look at the stack: not one thing in it is hard. Same with my inbox and my task list: not one email, not one unanswered text, not one item would take more than a minute or two. They’re puzzle pieces sitting in plain sight. Clutter, someone once told me, is just decisions delayed.
There’s a story in Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled that particularly resonated with me. Peck, well into adulthood, had decided he was simply not a person who could fix things. One day he watched a neighbor repairing a lawn mower and said something admiring, something about how he’d never been able to do that kind of thing. The neighbor didn’t look up. “That’s because you don’t take the time.”
I started wondering what I thought I was bad at that I really just hadn’t given enough time to.
If clutter isn’t a defect, if it’s just decisions I haven’t sat with long enough to make, then the reason I haven’t made them isn’t mysterious either. It’s time. And time is the one thing you can’t declutter your way into more of. I like to believe some part of us is unlimited, outside of time and space entirely.
Maybe so. But here, in a body, with a calendar, I get the same number of hours in a day as everyone else, and every day I get to answer the same question again: what will I devote them to?
If you have a stack of your own, here’s what I want you to hear: there’s nothing wrong with you. If you have even a modicum of ambition or care, you’re going to die with things on your to-do list and emails in your inbox. Everyone who’s engaged with life does. The stack isn’t proof you’re failing. It’s proof you’re in the game — and it’s a gift: every day, you get to decide what the hours are actually for.
From the Commonplace Book
“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
This week on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast, he released a conversation with David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, who thinks aging is a disease we’ll learn to treat. It’s a fascinating hour, and I’ll admit I want what he’s selling.
But somewhere in the middle I caught myself thinking: if someone handed me twenty more years tomorrow, would I spend them any differently than I’m spending this one? A long life and a good one aren’t the same thing. The first is his problem to solve. The second is still mine.
If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.
Wishing you every good thing, Brilliant