Issue #006 — A late August letter on a question I cannot stop turning over

Dear reader,

A late August letter. The question I cannot stop turning over, this past month, is whether the work I am most proud of has come from the seasons I felt most certain or the seasons I felt most lost. I sat with this for a long time. The honest answer surprised me.

Almost all of it came from the lost seasons.

Not the first weeks of being lost — those are usually defensive, brittle, full of bad ideas dressed up as new directions. The lost months that produced the work were the third or fourth months in, after the panic had quieted. The body had reluctantly accepted that the old plan was over and the new plan had not arrived yet. That gap, that long uncertain middle, is where the unfamiliar work shows up.

The certain seasons produced output. Often a lot of it. But the output usually looks, in retrospect, like elaborations of things I already knew how to make. Competent. Confident. Repeating myself.

I am writing this down because I am back in a lost month and I want to remember, in advance, that this is not a failure mode. The fog is the work. Or, more precisely, the fog is the precondition for the work. The pieces I will be most glad about three years from now are forming somewhere just past the edge of what I can see right now, and the only thing I have to do is not panic, not invent a fake plan to soothe the panic, and keep showing up.

If you are in a lost season too, I see you. The thing I would gently suggest is: do not announce a new direction yet. Let it shape itself in the dark for another month or two. Most of the directions I announced too quickly turned out to be defences against the discomfort, not real directions. The real ones came later, less dramatically, when I was too tired to perform.

More soon, in September.

Yours,
Enova