An author friend told me she fantasizes about quitting writing and becoming a postal worker. I’ve had the same dream for years. It’s only fantasy; I have an aunt who used to be a mailwoman, and years ago I helped to edit a terrific essay about how tough and demoralizing the job actually is. But it’s still a fantasy anytime I’m feeling overwhelmed, at least as I like to imagine: clock in, clock out, same route, same tasks, a paycheck, a pension. The author friend who shares the dream asked me yesterday if perhaps we’d been subconsciously influenced all this time by Kevin Costner in The Postman? I said I’d only seen the trailer. “No, me too,” she said, “that’s the point.”
People in all types of jobs dream of other jobs. An investment banker relative wants to be a farmer. An advertising stylist wants to work in movies. (Everyone in advertising wants to work in movies?) Another friend, a New York Times bestselling author, who suffered recently for months from a prolonged case of writer’s block, said she fantasized about quitting constantly, and all of it was mentally and physically painful, no joke. I knew exactly what she meant.
Sometimes I think I know what focus means, sometimes I have no idea. To pay attention, to prioritize one thing over another – ideally to see something more precisely. But sometimes it’s just about seeing it at all. Whole portions of the day can pass like a fog of worry. Will anyone like this thing I’m doing? Will anyone hear an echo of what I’m struggling to say – and not just in their mind, but their own words? I try to focus. I organize the day by the half-hour. I schedule follow-up emails to follow up on follow-ups I’ve already sent. I just did a tally and counted nine projects I’m trying to get off the ground, two more coming soon, and none promise in any way to live outside my computer. What’s the point? “You’re nothing but a drifter who found a bag of mail,” one of the characters in The Postman trailer tells Costner. Like he’s dictating the Handbook of Differential Diagnosis entry on writers everywhere, or perhaps all of us.
Then my wife, also a writer, gave me some advice. It was a day of calls, emails, demands from all corners. I’d lost myself, whacking the laptop – I’m very hard on keyboards – and she suggested I just stop. Stop, step away, go meditate for a few minutes. Look, I’m not great at meditation, doing it or setting time aside to do it, and when I’m in the middle of a whorl, it’s the last thing I want to do. But I did. And almost instantly I felt a sense of focus that was mutely, incredibly rich.
All the talk about being present, being in the moment – I guess “focus,” as a verb, for me rings more true. To share a moment with one aim lends me a lightness. I find again a sense of ease. It’s like a vent on the top of my skull just opened and the stale air rushed out. And I can get back, I guess, to delivering the mail.
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” – my Sunday bulletin with three-plus ideas of things to love – some focus-related recommendations of things that work well for me.
It’s an app I downloaded maybe 15 years ago and forgot about, then rediscovered two years ago, amidst our current mess, and wow, does this guy have my number.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful. “The Sunday Supplement” is his weekly round-up of three-plus ideas for things to love. No paid placements lol 💸
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. If you’d like a signed copy for yourself or somebody else, reply to this newsletter or send an email, we’ll figure it out, happily.
Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. Rosecrans’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.