Zero Day
Wherein the author pauses at the edge of a diving board, contemplating the drop.
My woodworking class starts tomorrow morning. I am not remotely ready.
I mean, I’ve sorted out everything I could sort out at this point. I’ve got the cheapest lodging in all of Devon rented for a week, in the hope that I’ll be able to find a roommate and/or a more stable living situation over the next handful of days. I’ve also managed to acquire a car, although in the end I wasn’t able to borrow one. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive, as a nonresident in the UK, to buy insurance for a vehicle you don’t own. Especially if the car your friend is offering to lend you is a Jaguar. So I bought one.
I had intended to buy something old, dull, cheap, and reliable like a Ford Fiesta or a Toyota Yaris and call it a day. Then I discovered the insurance market in the UK is bizarre and implacable. I was getting quotes around £2500 to insure one of them for the year. Apparently those kind of things are commonly used as first cars by teenagers, and beginning drivers have a well-known propensity to smash them into other vehicles. Instead I found a 2006 Mini Cooper convertible, which only cost me £950 to insure. And yes, it was bizarrely £800 cheaper to insure a convertible than a hardtop. Also about £250 cheaper to get comprehensive insurance than only third-party cover. Make that make sense. The car is a pretty red color with black racing stripes, and the lacquer may be peeling but it’s still far nicer than any of the really cheap things I was looking at. I’m hoping it serves me reliably and well for the next year and I thereafter manage to unload it for near what I bought it.
I’m supposed to turn up at Rowden Atelier at 9am on Tuesday for introductions. After that things get a bit vague. Most of the schools I’ve attended in the past run on their own schedule—even if you bomb polynomials in Algebra you’re jumping to quadratics next week whether you like it or not. Rowden doesn’t work like that. Every student progresses at their own pace. Most of the instruction is done one on one, so it’s fine for students to be out of sync with one another. You start the next section when you’re ready for it, and by the end of the course you’ll leave with whatever you managed to pick up on the way. So tomorrow I start what purports to be a rigorous, exacting training in cabinetmaking, with only the vaguest idea of what I’m going to learn, what skills I’m going to develop, and if any of it will translate into any possible career path afterwards.
I never really thought about what my life would be like in the future when I was young; I’ve been lucky enough to kind of do whatever I wanted without worrying too much about things like food or housing. I kind of got lost in the basic day-to-day routine. At the same time I somehow managed to dodge all the milestones like getting married or having children that tend to restrict your decisions in the future. There’s a wide range of things I could be doing but effectively nothing forcing me in any specific direction.
This feels weird. The way life is supposed to work, at least according all the guidance councilors I’ve had the misfortune to encounter, is you figure out what you want to do and then you go do that. Maybe that involves some special training, or maybe that involves some side hustle while you earn enough money to properly begin, but there’s certainly an idea out there that with enough guts and hustle you should be able to get wherever you want to go.
For most of its intended audience this is terrible advice. For one thing, most people are laughably bad at predicting what would make them happy. It’s a long, difficult, and expensive path between thinking maybe you’d like to go into medicine and landing your first job as a doctor; there’s a lot of opportunities for buyer’s remorse to set in. The bigger problem, I think, is that it puts all your focus on what you might achieve in the future, and encourages you to treat everything before that as busywork so you can get to the main event.
I’ve mentioned the book Four Thousand Weeks before. I still recommend it as an antidote to modern life. I think about it frequently. And one of the insights that’s stuck with me is that we conceive of time all wrong. We imagine it as if it’s a resource like money or oil or chocolate chip cookies. If you think about time like that you start to believe all sorts of weird things. It’s tempting for me to think of the last six months as a prelude to this woodworking class, and to think of this woodworking class as a prelude to whatever I end up doing when I rejoin regular life. But that’s all wrong. The last six months were my life. The next year will be my life. Whatever you’re doing, whether that’s lounging on a beach with a beer and a sunburn or hacking away at a computer keyboard in an office with no natural light or lying in bed anxiously doomscrolling instead of sleeping—that is your life. You can pretend it’s not, imagine all the boring or routine or embarrassing bits were merely interludes connecting the parts that mattered, but that’s a lie. Every single moment you’re alive is load bearing.
I’m not going to claim there’s any mystical quality to working with your hands or crafting something that you couldn’t theoretically derive from office work or a service job. You can find meaning anywhere. At the same time, a lot of the ways we organize our lives and our careers seem designed to actively hinder that. It’s all too easy to try and jam your existence into the gaps between your obligations. Spend your time doing things you hate so maybe later you can later spend time doing things you love. That isn’t working for me any more. I need a detox from modernity.
So a year in Devon it is. For the next twelve months, I hereby abjure all goals and repudiate all progress. I’m going to keep my focus on what’s in front of me. It’s okay to not have a plan, to not know where you’re going to end up and to refuse to game out your options ahead of time. I’m going to try and live my life one moment at a time, and if I don’t know where I’ll end up at the end of it all, well, it’s not called a leap of faith for nothing.
Let’s go build some boxes.