When Things Settle Down

A calm little phrase. Look what it’s doing to you.

There’s a number in your phone you keep meaning to call.

Not now. Now is a mess.

Now has the kids and the deadline and the thing with the car and the other thing you haven’t told anyone about. You’ll call when things settle down … when you can sit and actually talk instead of doing it in the driveway with the engine running.

You’ve been going to call for a while now.

Everybody’s got a list.

Yours lives in three places: a note on your phone, a drawer you don’t open, and the back of your skull where the real one is kept.

The guitar.

The trip.

The body you had at twenty-eight and keep meaning to get reacquainted with.

The book. The apology. The doctor’s appointment for the thing you’re pretty sure is nothing.

All of it filed under the same heading.

When things settle down.

Adulthood is the one DMV that hands you the keys and the crushing weight and zero instructions.

Least of all this one: Things don’t settle down.

That’s not pessimism, it’s mechanics. “Settled” isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a horizon, and horizons do that rude little thing where they move exactly as far as you walk.

Get the raise, and the raise shows up strapped to the job that eats the calm the raise was supposed to buy. Pay off the car, meet the roof. The kids get older and the older gets scarier.

Your brain … that magnificent idiot … resets the baseline every single time.

Psychologists have a flat little name for it, the hedonic treadmill, which makes it sound like gym equipment instead of the reason you will never once in your life feel caught up.

I spent a decade waiting for the water to go still.

You’re not lazy. I want that on the record, because lazy is the easy read and it’s the wrong one.

You’re being responsible. You’re handling what’s in front of you and deferring your own stuff so the people who need you don’t go without. From the outside it looks like sacrifice. It looks like a good man doing good-man things.

That’s the trap. It doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like character.

Nobody disappears in one big cowardly move … you’d catch that, you’d fight it. Men go one reasonable postponement at a time. Each one defensible. Each one responsible. Each one a small sane no to your own life.

String ten years of good decisions together and you look up one day as a competent stranger who provides.

The guitar has a layer of dust you could sign your name in.

There is exactly one day the water goes still. They put you in the ground.

That’s the calm. Everyone finally stops needing things from you, the deadlines go quiet, the water goes flat, and you are … at long, long last … completely caught up.

Congratulations. You made it. You can’t hear the band, but the band is playing.

The number in your phone belongs to someone. You know this. The reason you keep meaning to call is the exact reason you keep not calling: it matters, and the things that matter feel like they deserve the settled version of you. The calm one. The one with time.

That guy isn’t coming. He was never coming. There is only you, in the driveway, engine running, mess still on.

So call from the mess.

Play the guitar badly, in the noise, with somebody screaming in the next room.

Book the trip while the car’s still making the sound.

Make the appointment.

Write the bad first page.

You don’t need the water to go still … you need to do the thing in the current, because the current is the only condition life ever actually ships in.

The still water comes. I promise you it comes.

You just don’t want to be there when it does.

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