Oh, hi friends!
Last week I had jury duty. You show up at 9 a.m. and wait. One-third of the people in the room asked for postponements. They had to choose whether to come back in February or June.
The others, including me, waited. We were let go for lunch. It was raining. Few people remembered to bring umbrellas.
We came back and were told to “hang tight” for another update in an hour. Most people scrolled phones. A few stared into the middle distance. The people with postponements were long gone, off living their lives.
The judge didn’t call. We never left the waiting area. At 3:30pm, the clerk told us we had fulfilled our jury service and wouldn’t be called back for another four years. Claps and murmurs of “thank god” and “yesssss” bounced around the room.
Six and a half hours of waiting. An exercise in patience.
And a gamble: Postpone the inevitable or take the risk and wait it out?
There are often immovable obligations, yes. But February or June might have those immovable obligations, too. There will never be a good day for jury duty.
Just like there will never be a good day to start (or finish) that thing you’ve been meaning to do all year.
But you can start it. Finish it. Stick it out. Let’s not return to the waiting room in February or June. We’ve got too many other things to do.
…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Treat Yourself (or Someone You Love!)
If you’re like me and spent the weekend buying last-minute Christmas presents, can I humbly offer an under-$20 suggestion?
My new journal Do It Today is available to buy on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, and Amazon. I feel like I haven’t done a great job at talking about the journal, but writing it was definitely my biggest creative achievement of the last year.
It’s meant for anyone who could use a little encouragement and direction, a reframing of what it means to be “productive,” and advice on bouncing back from failure. Even if you’re not a “journal-y” person, there are short essays meant to boost your spirits!
I’m also giving away five (free!) copies of Do It Today via Instagram so drop a comment here if you’d like one.
And while my first journal Do It For Yourself is out of stock on Bookshop and Barnes & Noble (lol it’s become an annual tradition), there are still a few copies available on Amazon. It’ll be restocked everywhere soon (with the eighth printing!).
I really hope you might connect with these books, which grew from this very newsletter and contain my very best advice/stories/commiseration/reflective prompts. Thank you so much for your support.
That quote was just what I needed to hear today, thank you.
Yours,
Having a little cry,
Mxx