The Thing That Keeps Coming Back

The thing that has been sitting there all week

Been thinking about this all week.

It started with nothing dramatic. I was driving — just running an errand, nothing worth writing about — and a song came on that I hadn't heard in probably fifteen years. And for about three minutes, I wasn't in Alabama. I wasn't 44 with a mortgage and a Roblox side project and a to-do list that never fully clears. I was somewhere earlier. Somewhere that felt, weirdly, more like me.

I don't want to oversell it. It wasn't a revelation. It wasn't the universe dropping a message in my lap. It was just a song. But it cracked something open a little, the way small things sometimes do when your guard is down, and what came through the crack was this question I couldn't shake for the rest of the week: How much of what I'm building right now actually belongs to me?

Not in a crisis way. Not in a quit-everything way. More like — you know when you're cleaning out a drawer and you find something you forgot you owned, and for a second you wonder how you let it get buried under all that other stuff? It felt like that. A quiet inventory. A Sunday-morning kind of question that somehow showed up on a Tuesday.

Some days you just gotta sit with it. And this week, I did.

The part where I tried to logic my way out of it

My first instinct, because I am who I am, was to turn it into a problem to solve. Map it out. Figure out where the misalignment is, fix it, move on. Every day's a hustle — and part of that hustle, for me, has always been treating discomfort like a task. Something to clear from the queue.

So I started mentally auditing my days. The remote engineering work. The side gigs. The time I spend learning tools I'm not sure I'll ever fully use. I was looking for the leak, the place where the energy was going that wasn't coming back. And I found some candidates. A few commitments I'd made more out of momentum than intention. A couple of habits that used to serve me and now just kind of... persist.

But here's where it got interesting. The more I tried to pinpoint the problem, the more I realized the question wasn't really about any single thing. It wasn't about one bad habit or one misdirected project. It was something underneath all of that. Something about whether the overall shape of my days reflects who I actually am, or whether it reflects who I was trying to become at some earlier point — and whether those two people are still the same person.

I've written before about what alignment actually feels like when you're in it — that low-hum sense that the work and the life are pointed in the same direction. This week I was noticing the absence of that hum. Not silence, exactly. More like static. Everything functioning, nothing resonating.

The universe has a weird way of working things out. But I don't think it works things out for you. I think it just keeps nudging until you're ready to look.

What I kept circling back to

There's a version of this conversation I've had with myself before, and it usually ends with some kind of resolution. A decision. A pivot. A clean narrative about how I course-corrected. But this week the thought wouldn't cooperate. It just kept circling. And eventually I stopped trying to land it and just let it move.

What I kept coming back to was this: there's a difference between building something and becoming something. And I think for a long time I've been very focused on the building — the outputs, the projects, the stacked income streams, the skills — without asking often enough whether all that construction is pointing toward a version of myself I actually want to live as.

I'm not saying the hustle is wrong. I'm not saying the side gigs don't matter or the work isn't real. It is. But I think there's a kind of deeper work that doesn't look like hustle at all — the slower, quieter work of making sure the life you're building has a you-shaped space in the middle of it. A place where the person doing all the building actually fits.

John would probably say something here about how the system is designed to keep you too busy to ask that question. He's not entirely wrong. Dante would pour a drink and tell me I'm overthinking it. He's not entirely wrong either. Victor would just sit there and let the silence do the work, the way he does. Maybe that's the most honest response of all.

I think about how much meaning is already inside the ordinary days, if you're paying attention. And I wonder if the song in the car wasn't telling me anything new. Maybe it was just reminding me to pay attention again.

Where I'm leaving it

I don't have a tidy close for this one. That's not me being coy — I genuinely don't. The week ended the same way it started: with a question I haven't answered and a feeling I haven't fully named.

What I can say is that I'm not in the kind of discomfort that demands immediate action. It's more like the discomfort of a room that's slightly too warm. You notice it. You don't stop living your life. But you don't forget it either.

Maybe that's enough for a Sunday. Maybe the whole point of sitting with something is that you don't have to resolve it to let it mean something. The question itself is doing work, even when I'm not.

The universe has a weird way of working things out. I believe that. I also believe it's in no particular hurry, and neither, today, am I.

Talk soon.

— Jeff