Issue #003 — A summer letter on slowing down without falling behind
July keeps getting recruited as a project. A short note on undefended afternoons and the boredom that grows ideas.
Friend,
A short letter, because the season asks for one.
I keep meeting people who treat July like a project to be completed. They have summer reading lists. Summer goals. Summer launches. The season has been recruited into the same machinery as the rest of the year, and if it has a job to do, it cannot also be a season.
The thing summer used to do, in the version of life I half-remember from being twelve, was nothing. It was a long, slow, slightly bored corridor between two more structured things. The boredom mattered. Ideas grew in the boredom the way mushrooms grow in the dark — quietly, and not on demand.
I am not going to tell you to take a holiday. You know whether you can. I am going to say: try one afternoon. One. With no objective. No book you are getting through. No walk that is also exercise. No coffee that is also a meeting. Just a flat, undefended afternoon, and see what surfaces in your head when nothing is asked of it.
If something useful comes up, write it down. If nothing comes up, that is the experiment working.
The work will be there on Monday. It will be a slightly different shape than you left it, and so will you, and that is the point.
Yours,
Enova