I was driving out of a gym parking lot and my phone rang. New York number.
“Jonathan?” My otherwise somber editor sounded pleased. “You did it. Made the list. Your book is a New York Times bestseller.”
Ten years spent grinding for this moment. My entire twenties evaporated into footnotes. While friends collected ticket stubs and passport stamps, I collected 1,300 citations for my first wellness book.
The words arrived in my ear. Traveled to my brain. And died.
Something in my soul vacated without leaving a note. I think my editor kept talking.
“Jonathan? Are you there?”
Sounds like “That’s incredible. Thank you. This is… wow.” probably came out of my mouth, but my body knew the truth. This is what I’d been killing myself for? This internal dial tone where joy should be?
Anxiety quickly filled the opening. “What position?” I ask. “How do we stay on next week?”
She laughs. Thinks I’m joking. I’m not. Accomplishing a lifelong goal made me more anxious. It can only go down from here.
The call was quick. I hung up and turned left out of the parking lot. And then, nothing. Not even memory. I know I drove home. I had to have told my wife Angela, who’d eaten dinner alone for years while I was working for this moment. Must have called my parents. There’s evidence these conversations happened. But in my memory of anything after that call? Nothing. Like my mind redacted my dream.
All those years. For a moment so meaningless my own brain wouldn’t keep it.
Years later, my Microsoft days were behind me and I was making soup. Not meal-prep soup, not optimized-macro-nutrient soup. Just soup because it was cold and all four ladies said soup sounded good.
I was chopping carrots when I noticed something different. My shoulders weren’t trying to protect my neck from a phantom guillotine. The knife moved quickly and smoothly without me trying. No podcast screaming at 2x speed. No mental Tetris with tomorrow’s calendar. Just knife through carrot and spoon through bubbling broth. My glasses fogged. I took them off and kept stirring slowly, legally blind. For the first time, my kitchen felt like a place where I nourished my family instead of a command center.
It wasn’t impressive, but I realized it was actually flow when I tried to “optimize” it the next weekend. Duplicated everything: the soup, the start time, even the shirt. This time with the goal of getting back into flow like a champion.
A champion never quits, but they do get carrot juice all over their phones like multitasking morons. I cut myself twice and burned myself on the pot. The soup tasted like trying too hard.