The Week I Stopped Trying to Figure It Out

The Thing That's Been Sitting There

Been thinking about this all week.

It started small — the way things do. I was sitting in the car after a delivery run, engine still ticking, not really ready to go back inside yet. Just kind of… parked there in the driveway. The porch light was on. I could hear something on the radio but I wasn't listening to it. And I had this thought, almost out of nowhere, that I genuinely couldn't tell you what I was working toward right now. Not in a crisis kind of way. More like when you've been driving for a long time and you suddenly realize you've stopped paying attention to where you are.

I do a lot of things. Every day's a hustle — I mean that literally, not as a slogan. There's the day job, there's the side stuff, there's the family, there's the list. I stay moving. And for the most part, that motion has always felt like enough of an answer. Keep going. Figure it out as you go. The universe has a weird way of working things out.

But sitting in that car, I wasn't sure the motion was pointed anywhere specific. And I didn't know if that was fine or if it was something I'd been quietly avoiding thinking about for a while.

I didn't go inside and journal about it. I didn't make a plan. I just sat there a little longer. Some days you just gotta sit with it.

That was the start of the week. The thought didn't leave.

What Motion Hides From You

Here's the thing about staying busy — and I say this as someone who genuinely likes being busy — it is very good at making you feel like you're making progress. And sometimes you are. But sometimes the motion is just motion. It's not going anywhere in particular, it's just going, and the sensation of movement is convincing enough that you don't stop to check.

I've written before about what alignment actually feels like — that quiet sense when the thing you're doing and the reason you're doing it are pointing in the same direction. And I think what I was bumping into this week is the absence of that. Not a disaster. Not a breakdown. Just a low-grade drift. The kind that happens when you're executing well on the wrong heading.

The honest version of this is: I've been productive. I've been consistent. I've checked the boxes. But I'm not sure the boxes I've been checking are connected to anything I actually decided I wanted. Some of them I just inherited — from habit, from obligation, from the logic of what comes next when you're already doing the thing before it.

That's not a complaint. It's more of an observation. The way you can notice you've been holding your shoulders up for hours and not realize it until you finally let them drop.

I think I've been holding my shoulders up.

The week didn't give me a resolution on this. But it gave me the question more clearly than I've had it in a while, and I'm starting to think the question itself is the useful part — that the real work sometimes isn't more hustle but the harder thing of asking whether the hustle is aimed right.

Meaning Doesn't Announce Itself

I used to think meaning was something you found at the end of something. Like it was the reward for finishing. You build the thing, you complete the arc, and then you understand what it was for. And maybe that's true sometimes. But I don't think that's the whole picture anymore.

What I've noticed — slowly, over a long time — is that meaning tends to show up sideways. Not at the finish line. Not in the big moment. It shows up in the driveway at 9:47 on a Tuesday, engine ticking, porch light on. It shows up in the middle of an ordinary stretch of days when something small catches the light at an angle you weren't expecting.

There's a version of this I keep coming back to — the idea that the hustle itself is full of little signals if you're paying attention. Not road signs, exactly. More like the way a room feels different when the furniture has been moved, even if you can't immediately name what changed. Something in you knows before your brain catches up.

I don't think I've been paying that kind of attention lately. I've been paying the other kind — the task-completion kind, the keep-the-plates-spinning kind. Which is necessary. I'm not romanticizing stillness here. But there's a difference between being present in the work and being consumed by the motion of it.

This week reminded me of that difference. Not loudly. Just persistently. The way a thought will keep surfacing until you actually look at it instead of swimming past it again.

I looked at it this time. I'm still not sure what I'm seeing. But I'm looking.

Still Parked in the Driveway

I don't have a clean place to land this. That's not me being coy — it's just where the week left me.

There's something unresolved sitting in the middle of all this. A question about whether the direction I'm moving is the direction I actually chose, or whether I just got good at moving and forgot to keep checking the heading. I can't answer that in a Sunday column. I'm not sure I can answer it at all right now, and I've made a kind of peace with that this week.

Some things take longer than a week. Some things take longer than you want them to. I've been thinking about that too — how the patience required to let a question breathe without forcing it into an answer is its own kind of discipline. Not passive. Not avoiding. Just not rushing something that isn't ready yet.

The universe has a weird way of working things out. I've seen it enough times to mostly trust that. But I also know that phrase can become a way of outsourcing the thinking, if you're not careful. The universe works things out, sure — but it helps when you're paying attention to what it's working with.

So that's where I am. Still a little parked. Still listening to the engine tick.

I'll let you know if anything shifts.