Some Version of Tension
A live report from the first few days back, written before I know how it ends.
I returned from a week-long vacation on a Friday night. I felt a slight urge to check what I might have missed at my job.
But I didn’t open my email until I reached my desk Monday morning.
That was intentional. A full week away, and I wanted to keep it that way until the last possible minute.
Monday morning arrived, and I reached my desk, the cursor over the icon. I felt something specific. It felt more like bracing than dread.
What happened while I was gone?
What’s waiting for me now?
What is this going to demand of me today?
I clicked it anyway.
An hour or so later, caught up.
Not behind.
Not buried.
The work I’d done before I left, closing loops, finishing what could be finished, handing off what couldn’t, had already done its job one thousand miles and seven days ago.
No “oh no” moment waiting in that inbox. Just the residue of a decision I’d made before I ever boarded a plane.
That’s a favor I did my future self, not luck, back before I knew exactly what shape it would take, closing a loop now so it couldn’t ambush him later.
That only covers what I actually touched, though.
Napoleon found the other half of it two centuries before I needed it.
Letters left intentionally unopened, for weeks at a time. When he finally opened the pile, four out of five no longer needed an answer at all, handled by someone else, resolved by time, or already moot. He never said what he made of that.
I know what I make of it. Most of what lands on my desk, someone else was already capable of handling. They just hadn’t been told I wasn’t coming to do it for them.
When something is actually mine to carry, I carry it; that’s the duty my roles come with, not something I get to opt out of.
A staff member figuring out their own answer isn’t the same as my son still not getting his own gas without me sitting in the car, no matter how many times I’ve nudged him toward it, and I’m not pretending they are.
Both used to lean on me by default. Only one of them I’ve been trying to teach out of it on purpose.
What’s the same is the reflex, not the stakes, the assumption that nothing gets handled unless I’m the one handling it.
Stay in that mode long enough, at work or at home, and you never get to your own list. You just keep excellent time on everyone else’s.
I’ve been running one test on this longer than I’ve had language for it: what happens to them the day I’m not there to give it, not what they need from me right now.
Did I leave them more capable, or just quietly more dependent?
Which is exactly why I can’t live in my inbox.
Chris Sacca named it years before I understood what he meant: left alone, an inbox fills up entirely with other people’s priorities. Getting free of it was never about the number of messages. It was about remembering whose list I was actually supposed to be working from.
I’ve been leaning on a smaller version of the same math for a while now, snoozing.
An email shows up, and instead of answering it, arguing with it, or feeling guilty about it sitting there, I snooze it.
Not today. Not now. Not urgent.
It’s a small button, but it’s really a decision, made in about two seconds, about what actually deserves my attention right now and what’s just asking for it.
Here’s a feeling I’ve been sitting with, and it’s not fully flattering.
Most reminders are just that, someone helping, and I take them as exactly that.
But every so often one carries something else underneath it, unmistakable even when nobody says it outright: do that thing, on my timeline, now.
That’s the one that flares something in me before I can stop it.
Not gratitude.
Frustration.
Some of that is surface, a flinch at being read as forgetful, when really I know the whole board, every piece still in play, and the thing they just named was never the next move.
But underneath that is the sharper part. I already know the task.
What I don’t share is their timeline for it; something else has to close first before that one gets what it deserves.
It’s my board, not theirs, and the two don’t always line up.
How much I let myself hold open at once, at work and at home, is the real question, because a closed loop costs the same amount of attention whether it belongs to a colleague or one of my own sons.
The inbox was never actually it.
There’s a part of this I’m still working out. Not everything can wait.
Not everything asks less of me just because I’ve gotten better at spotting what’s loud.
My job asks real things of me, a role, a responsibility that doesn’t disappear because I’d rather it did.
So does my own house, and the people in it who need me actually present, not just physically in the room.
None of that is noise I get to dismiss, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie.
The pull I feel isn’t always my old habits reasserting themselves. Sometimes it’s just Tuesday, at the office or at home, doing what Tuesday does.
So the fight was never about making the pull go away. It was never going to be.
The fight is in the half second after the pull arrives, before I decide what to do with it. Something lands: an email, a request, a fire that isn’t actually a fire, and there’s a gap, smaller than a breath, where I choose.
Reactive or intentional. Nobody hands you that gap. You just have to notice it’s there.
I’ve started calling the whole thing the vortex, the tractor beam that pulls you in whether you want to go or not.
Some days it feels exactly like that.
The job, the calendar, the old default settings, all of it pulling at once, and me deciding, moment to moment, whether I’m getting sucked in or holding my line.
I’ve noticed something I don’t fully understand yet.
The scatter is uncomfortable. But it’s familiar.
My mind knows how to survive in it.
Twenty-plus years of this job could explain that on its own.
Fifty-plus years of this life is closer to the truth.
The stillness I found on that balcony, the blank mind, staring at the horizon with nothing to latch onto, that was actually comfortable.
It just felt foreign, because I’ve spent so little time there.
Comfortable and familiar aren’t the same thing.
Someone once wrote that when intention and attention finally align, the archer and the target become one. I’m not there yet.
If there’s a word for all of this, it’s tension. Not crisis, not conflict.
Tension, the kind that doesn’t resolve by picking a side, because both sides are actually real.
I know what that reckoning actually feels like in the body, not just the idea of it.
Last Spartan race, hip deep in water and mud, I went down four or five times in the last hundred yards. The last time, on my hands and knees, I told myself the only true thing left.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Get up.
I know exactly how that part goes.
I don’t know yet if this is the same kind of fall.
Before I left for my last vacation, I wrote that a version of me could get left at the airport, or carried home through customs, folded into my luggage, waiting to unpack himself the moment things got hard again.
It’s Wednesday. I don’t have an answer yet.
Is the pull stronger, or am I?