Good morning Reader,
I pulled off the main road into Table Rock State Park and within a few hundred yards the surroundings closed in around me. The trees came up close to the road, the ground began to rise, and I could feel the mountains in the way the RV leaned into the climb. At a stop sign near the swimming lake, a park ranger came jogging over. Where are you headed, he asked. Site 14, I told him. In that thing? He looked down the length of the RV, then back at me, and told me I was going to have to be careful getting back there. I asked if he would help me. He got in his truck and drove ahead of me the whole way, slow, watching the tight turns, leading me back through the terrain until I was parked in a spot barely long enough to hold me. I would be there ten days.
I had come to write a book that had been summoning me for four years. The idea of a book didn’t arrive as a clear plan. It arrived as a pull, one hug at a time, across four summers of driving this country and standing with people in warehouses and on loading docks and in break rooms, listening to them tell me about their lives. People just like you and me. In all of those embraces a book started to gather in me, and for four years I found good reasons to wait.
The reasons were good. The FAM was landing in your inbox every Sunday, and the replies that came back kept me believing it mattered, that the words were reaching the person reading them. My calendar was full, at home and at work. There were stretches when I would park the RV for three or four days and fly across the country for a speaking date and then fly back to it. Stepping away to actually write the thing felt like the self-indulgent move. Who disappears on the people counting on him? So I kept to life’s schedule instead of the summons.
So in early March I finally said it out loud. I wrote you a letter, the fortieth one, and told you I was stepping away for a while to write. I borrowed Thoreau to say it, that I was going to the woods to live deliberately. What I didn’t tell you, because I had not yet told myself, was what I was most afraid of losing. It was one moment. The quiet of a Sunday morning, the coffee poured, a letter from me open, and for a few minutes something in us met. That is the moment that fuels me, and I was afraid that if I stepped away it would not be there when I came back.
For the better part of three and a half months I lived out of the RV and let the noise fade away. I read at night, Emerson and Thoreau and others, the way you read when you are trying to hear yourself again. I wrote, most of it slow. Then one Sunday afternoon in campsite 14 I finished the outline of the whole book, all twelve chapters, and I sat and read it start to finish. The thread running through all of it rose up within me. It was the shape of all the hugs and all the stories I’ve experienced over the last years. People wanting to go deep within to release what they cannot control, to center themselves on what is most true, and hold nothing back in becoming the person they were born to be. In this outline, in your stories, I saw myself. I saw where I had been, where I had struggled, where I had come through, and who I am still becoming. The floodgate opened and I broke down and cried, alone, in a camp chair, in the woods.
When I went looking for the name of that park for this letter, scrolling my phone for the photos, I found a picture of an open book from those ten days. It was a page of Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul. I had underlined a sentence on it, and out in the margin, in my own handwriting, I had written a single word. Yearning.
I had written it weeks before that night in the camp chair, and I had no idea yet what it was pointing at. The sentence I underlined was this. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world always before her, leaving worlds always behind her. A few lines down I had underlined another. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, by motion in a straight line, but by ascension of state, by metamorphosis. Beside it I had written, we keep trying to measure our lives in numbers, but a soul cannot be measured that way. It is felt.
I looked the word up, the way you do when a word starts following you around. Yearning traces back to an old word for reaching toward something with an aching hunger. For years I had treated that ache as something out of reach in an otherwise good life. The word, however, told me the ache was worth following. What I had been carrying was my own soul, reaching with everything it had toward the life that was mine. In that state park I finally understood what I was doing out there. I was going inward so I could go forward. I was learning to create the world in front of me instead of accepting the one the noise kept handing me. I was not only writing a book. I was becoming the man who could write the book.
Most of us have felt some version of this. The pull that arrives on a drive, or at the kitchen sink, or in the quiet hour before sleep, the sense that there is something more with no clean name for it. Most of us have been taught to distrust it. We give it a hundred wrong names, restlessness, ingratitude, a phase we are going through, the wrong feeling at the wrong time. We tell ourselves we have no right to want more than the good life we already built, so we file the pull away and keep performing the life instead of fully living it.
I have come to believe the pull is the truest thing in us. It is not asking us what to do. It is telling us who we are capable of becoming. Yearning is your soul calling you to your own truth. If there is some longing you keep postponing, a quiet more you have been setting aside for a better season, I don’t think it’s restlessness. I think it is you, waiting, the way I was waiting for me.
I am back in Barrington now, on this Sunday, writing to you in real time again. The book is not finished. Six of the twelve chapters are drafted, and the rest is still ahead of me. But I am no longer postponing the thing that was always mine to move towards.
I keep coming back to one thing. Every moment we are handed is a chance to move one small step toward the life that is truly ours, or one small step away from it. When a moment passes, another arrives, and it is the first one all over again. A new chance. This one, the one you are in right now, reading this, is one of them.
So look up for a second from whatever you have stopped seeing. The longing you have been carrying is not in your way. It is the way. And it is still yours.
It is good to be back.