#1 - A change in direction

An update

Last year, in August perhaps, I came across this excerpt in an essay by Henrik Karlsson.

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding. Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

• I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

• Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

Putting this sequence of words through my processor was like sticking a finger in an electric socket. After the shock had rippled through me and I could return to myself again, I found the words offering me some kind of legitimacy. I lapped up the essay, went ahead and read up on the idea of unfolding, read up on the man who came up with the concept, got my hands on Notes on the Synthesis of Form in which he introduces the concept, wrote about it (that’s how I best absorb ideas), and practiced it with intention.

I’ll come back to the two italicized words in a moment.

Back in August, I had just quit my corporate job of eleven years. I had been writing on decision-making at the workplace for a couple of years. (This newsletter has been all about that.) On a lark, I had been mentoring a couple of people at work and one outside for a while, and I had discovered that I was quite enjoying myself. After putting in my papers, I had had to serve a rather long notice period and had found myself with some time on hand. So, by the time I read Karlsson’s piece…

• I had signed up for a professional coach training program. It was virtual, the hours worked for me, and I liked, having already mentored people for 70-80 hours, the process of pitting my mental models around how to help people tell themselves what to do against the reality of it.

• I had just started writing longform creative nonfiction. I had read this business-y memoir of a restaurateur-entrepreneur that I had quite liked. I pulled the heart of that — minus the management lessons — into this character sketch, written in reverse chronology. It felt good, incomplete. What if I could talk to the subject I’m profiling, I wondered, and turned to a friend of mine whose debut feature film had left a mark on me and was making waves on the festival circuit. So I wrote about him, the narrative combining two threads of his life, unspooling at different times and speeds.

Still, I had my misgivings. I did not have an end game. I spent afternoons with doubt.

That changed swiftly. If the symphony of Karlsson’s piece reached deep, its reverberations soared far. Come September and I was riding on them. I started coaching people and writing longform a lot more. My wife was surprised by the seriousness of my pursuits—by all external yardsticks, I was a dabbler. Though I suspect she began to get wind of my growing fervor for my two new interests, as she read fifteen-thousand-word-long drafts and tolerated me interrupting her with outpourings of my mini-epiphanies from coaching work. As weeks turned into months, I found some people along the way who shared my enthusiasm for the same things. They watched my coaching sessions or read my writing with the objective of making me better at my craft. I reciprocated.

My life had changed before too. But this time round that change was happening under my watch. With intention.

For one, this give-and-take with fellow enthusiasts felt different from my early experiences as a creator online. In the past, I had been guilty of confusing my need for validation online with a desire for fellowship that I felt abashed to admit to myself. These exchanges were closer to communion, at a remove from validation.

By November, I had further legitimized my experience of unfolding by bringing it to bear on my life beyond work. We gave up our plans to buy a bigger house, rent-swapped houses (neither on the cards at the start of the year), and designed our dream balcony. I was on my way to spend time with a nine-year-old boy who did things I couldn’t turn away from.

The unfolding spilled over to this newsletter. Gimlet-eyed readers noticed a shift. I wrote less about decision-making frameworks, more about the human iceberg and John McPhee and The New Yorker profiles. Little wonder.

Back when I was living the reality of a job and dreaming of being a solopreneur, I had imagined this newsletter to generate leads for my business. On my Substack dashboard, I had chosen the category Business for it. Since I’ve quit, the biggest source of attention for my decision-making and coaching business has been from LinkedIn, then word of mouth. It’s taken me a while to see this change, and instead of resisting it, I want to go along with it.

The Internet is a lonely place. By allowing us an infinite number of rabbit holes, it pushes us — those spending two-thirds of our waking hours online — deeper into ourselves. It affords so much room for our crazy, weird, singular pursuits that we can be lost to the outside world, except to those who share our obscure interests.

In its present form, this newsletter is not designed to find those who share my weirdness. It is designed to fit a different — dated — context of my life. As that context has changed, so must the form that fits it.

So: while my work as a decision-making trainer and as a coach will go on, this space will be for something else.

What will I do here? I hope to write about things that excite me as I allow myself this process of unfolding. I’m looking for a space where there’s minimum separation between what I can say to myself and what I allow myself to say out loud.

There’s some sadness in letting this newsletter go. It feels like letting go of a part of me. Not quite that. It feels more like shedding an old skin.

Writing unselfconsciously about myself sometimes feels so daunting that I’m happy to take up an objectively harder project, just to escape the emotional labor. So, I’m nervous about what’s in store. But I know that if I pay attention to the context, remove things that frustrate me, and expand things that make me feel alive, there’s a good chance that things will turn out well.

A chilli unfolding. Sketch by a young artist.