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.