You Are a Whirlpool · Rule IV

fol. 5
19
  1. The five rules
  2. I
  3. II
  4. III
  5. IV
  6. V
A traveller at a fork in the road under a wayside cross, a shattered glass at his feet
Rule IV: A traveller at a fork in the road under a wayside cross, a shattered glass at his feet
Rule IV of five · Fork

You can only push now. Some pushes pick the road.

A letter from Justin Hartfield. About 3 minutes.

You’ve dropped a glass. There’s the sound, and then there’s the thought that comes right after it, faster than any other thought you have: I want that back. You can’t have it back. You can sweep it up, buy another one, laugh about it. But that glass, in that shape, is gone, and no amount of wanting runs the film backward.

The whole world works like the glass. Cream stirred into coffee never unstirs. A burned match never unburns. You get a year older and never a year younger. Physics has a name for this one-way street, but you already know it in your bones, because you’ve been living on it your whole life. Time runs one way.

This sounds sad. It’s actually the best news in these letters. If time only runs one way, then there is exactly one place where you can push on the world, and it’s now. Not yesterday. You can think about yesterday all you like, but you can’t push on it. Not tomorrow either. You can plan for it, and you should, but the push itself can only happen here. All of your power lives in one small moving spot called now. That’s not a limit. That’s where to stand.

Most pushes don’t do much. Push a boulder sitting in a dip and it rolls right back to where it was. That’s most days. You try something, life rolls back, and you try again. But every so often you come to a different kind of moment. A pencil balanced on its tip is the picture to keep in your head. It’s standing, but barely. The smallest push picks which way it falls, and once it falls, it doesn’t climb back up. Those moments are forks. A move to a new city. The first real conversation with someone. The morning a habit finally breaks. The week a crisis hits and you have to decide what kind of person you are now.

Three things follow from this.

First, regret and worry are the same mistake pointed in different directions. Both spend today’s push on a place you can’t push. I know regret feels like it’s doing something. It isn’t. The only thing that can be done about yesterday is to push better today.

Second, learn to feel a fork coming. They have a wobble to them. Things feel unsteady, both ways look possible, and you can sense that a small move would count for a lot. That wobble is not a warning to freeze. It’s a sign that this is one of the few moments where your push really matters. Make it on purpose.

Third, you don’t go back, ever, and that’s fine. People spend years trying to get back to how things were. The old job, the old town, the way a family was before something changed. The house may still be there, but the you who lived in it isn’t, and neither is the world around it. What you can do is go forward to somewhere new. Some of the best places you’ll ever stand are on the far side of a fork you didn’t choose.

Try this tonight, and every night for a week.

Before bed, name one moment from the day where a small push picked the road. A thing you said or didn’t say. A door you walked through or past. Just name it. After a week, look at the list and notice where the forks tend to show up in your days. You’ll start to feel the wobble before it’s over.

One line to remember

You can’t push yesterday. You can’t push tomorrow. Push now, and watch for the wobble.