Richard Jeffrey Newman

Dear C — , 

When my wife and I bought this apart­ment, I was in busi­ness for myself and we turned this room into an office because part of the rea­son for start­ing my own busi­ness in the first place was that I wanted to be able to work from home. It was the 1990s, and it was the dot-com boom, and free­lanc­ing was the way to take con­trol of your life, even if it meant being avail­able more hours a day, seven days a week, more or less every­where you went — I hated my cell phone — than you’d ever thought pos­si­ble. Yes, I read all the arti­cles about how you work to live, not live to work, and I actu­ally tried to take some of the advice the writ­ers of those arti­cles gave about set­ting aside time for your­self and your fam­ily, even just an hour-long walk around the block in the mid­dle of the day, but despite my best efforts the busi­ness seeped into every cor­ner of my life, like the water that was leak­ing, when we first moved in, from the roof into our din­ing room, and it took them for­ever to find the leak itself because it could’ve been com­ing from any­where, right above us, or even all the way at the other end of the build­ing, because who knew what fis­sures were run­ning through the building’s infra­struc­ture and water flows where there is space for it to flow. That’s what my busi­ness was like. Didn’t mat­ter what I was involved in, some­where in the spaces between what I was say­ing or think­ing or doing with my hands, images of the client project I was work­ing on, or the mar­ket­ing ideas I had yet to try out, or the thing I should’ve said at the net­work­ing event that I didn’t think of at the time, or doubts about whether I should even be try­ing to make it on my own, flick­ered across the screen in my brain, and if I wasn’t in busi­ness mode I had to remind myself, I had to strug­gle to remind myself, that there would be time to deal with it later, when I was in busi­ness mode.

And there were the emer­gency calls, the last minute, do-or-die change requests, the hag­gling over deliv­ery dates and dead­lines — all of it pulling me away from some­thing I knew I didn’t want to be pulled away from, and that too was part of the prob­lem, I didn’t know what this some­thing was. I only knew that doing busi­ness left me feel­ing like I was neglect­ing some­thing I couldn’t afford to neglect. I was mak­ing money, though, enough of it that the pos­si­bil­ity didn’t seem as far fetched as it should have that if I hung in there I’d even­tu­ally reach the point you saw immor­tal­ized in all those ads for cell phones and call­ing plans and lap­top com­put­ers and per­sonal dig­i­tal assis­tants which promised me that if I lib­er­ated myself from my desk­top it would be no time before I was doing busi­ness from the beach or some other fun-in-the-sun type spot. So I decided the prob­lem was not within me, but rather that I wasn’t out there enough in the busi­ness world. I needed to be with other peo­ple who were doing what I was doing. I needed for them to become my friends, col­leagues and men­tors, and so I signed up for net­work­ing groups, and I went to the dot-com and free­lance net­work­ing par­ties that were sup­posed to be as well a chance to social­ize, and I joined the new media trade asso­ci­a­tion and became active in one of their inter­est groups, but none of it helped. I was still feel­ing empty.

So then I joined a group billing itself as the kind of com­mu­nity entre­pre­neurs really needed, one that addressed both the unique busi­ness require­ments and the social needs of peo­ple who had their own com­pa­nies. I will not bore you fur­ther with the details of my year as a mem­ber of that group, but I will tell you that in my very first meet­ing — they called it a needs assess­ment — I began to gather the seeds that would grow into my deter­mi­na­tion not only not to be in busi­ness for myself, but to refuse any work that did not make some part of me feel more alive each day that I did it, even if that feel­ing of alive­ness came from my own anger and frus­tra­tion at the dif­fi­cul­ties that the work brought into my life.

“The first thing you need to ask your­self,” the group leader was sit­ting oppo­site me on the other side of a con­fer­ence table, a tin of choco­lates between us, and then his assis­tant came in with two cups of tea and the pad for tak­ing notes that he’d for­got­ten to bring in with him. “The first thing you need to ask your­self is whether this busi­ness is some­thing you’d die if you weren’t able to do.” The ques­tion seemed a lit­tle — a little? — hyperbolic to me, but I answered him seri­ously, explain­ing that what I wanted was to have a busi­ness that earned me the money that I needed and left me the time to live my life as I wanted to live it, even if I didn’t quite yet know what how-I-wanted-to-live-it meant.

“Well,” he put his pen down on top of the pad — all he’d done so far was write my name — and he leaned for­ward so I would know how impor­tant his next point was, “what you really have to decide is whether you are will­ing to devote your life to mak­ing this busi­ness into some­thing that will last.”

I tried to point out that he had not really heard me the first time. I wasn’t inter­ested in becom­ing a mil­lion­aire entre­pre­neur, nor was I inter­ested in build­ing a com­pany that would out­last me or that I would be able to hand on to my son, who had just been born a cou­ple of months ear­lier. I wanted to take what­ever design tal­ent I had and put it at the ser­vice of clients who would pay me well enough, and I repeated the phrase again, that I could live my life the way I wanted live it.

“But you don’t under­stand…” he tried again to get me to see things his way, and we went back and forth a few more times, and then I left feel­ing not like I’d wasted my time, but like I’d had that con­ver­sa­tion before, and when I got home I put on a Beethoven string quar­tet, num­ber 15 I think — it’s a trick I learned when I was an under­grad­u­ate: You put on a string quar­tet, it doesn’t have to be Beethoven, but his seem to work best for me, and then lis­ten, prefer­ably with a set of head­phones. You let your mind wan­der wher­ever the music takes it and your thoughts will inevitably come to some­thing you need. It may not be what you thought you were look­ing for, but it will be some­thing you need, you can be sure of that. Any­way, I sat for a long time in this big chair we have in our liv­ing room — my wife and son were out for the day so it was quiet and I had the time to let the music play till the end — and I don’t remem­ber much of what I thought about, but some­where in the quartet’s final move­ment, I real­ized why my con­ver­sa­tion with that com­mu­nity leader was so famil­iar to me. Do you know Rilke’s Let­ters To A Young Poet? They are a won­der­ful series of let­ters he wrote to a young man who asked Rilke for advice about being a writer. I pulled down my copy of the book, which I hadn’t looked at in many, many years and started to read. This is from the first letter:

There is only one thing you should do. Go into your­self. Find out the rea­son that com­mands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; con­fess to your­self whether you would have to die if you were for­bid­den to write. This most of all: ask your­self in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into your­self for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in the assent, if you meet this solemn ques­tion with a strong, sim­ple “I must,” then build your life in accor­dance with this neces­sity; your whole life, even into its hum­blest and most indif­fer­ent hour, must become a sign and wit­ness to this impulse.

I am not a writer, and while I am a graphic designer — or at least while I have been a graphic designer all my work­ing life, until recently, that is, when I lost the job I took after I gave up my busi­ness — I do not think of my design as an art to which I must ded­i­cate my life in the way that Rilke describes.

Ah, again I must leave you. Some­one is at the door and then — I’m look­ing at the clock — I have to go food shop­ping. We’re giv­ing a din­ner party this week­end and I’m cook­ing. More later or tomorrow.