I woke up early the other day. Couldn't sleep.
I'd been listening to something the night before — the kind of thing that quietly rearranges what you thought was solid. And lying there in the dark, I finally had words for how work has felt lately.
Imagine you live in a world that knows, from a hundred angles, that the earth is round. The proof is everywhere. A child could find it.
And imagine your job is to design the anchor that keeps the boats from falling off the edge.
You're good at it. You optimize the weight. You make it rustproof. You engineer a pulley system so it runs smooth. You could teach it you know it so well.
And none of it matters, because the boats were never going to fall.
That's what most of my work has felt like. Not badly done — the opposite. Done well. Perfected. In service of a problem that isn't there.
The hard part isn't that the work is difficult. It's that some part of me already saw the round earth, and I keep going in to reinforce the edge anyway.
I don't have a tidy ending for this one. Just the noticing.
If you've ever been excellent at something you've stopped believing in — you know exactly the weight I mean.