The Time Coffin · Part 7 of 7
The Time Sanctuary
I performed as Harold Haughton.
Full scholarship from PepsiCo and the American Reinsurance Company — the insured insurance companies, a fact I found funny at twelve and still find funny. The American Boychoir School. A solo at Carnegie Hall in Marvin Hamlisch's Anatomy of Peace. I originated the title role in Menotti's The Singing Child at Spoleto. I travelled all over the world singing.
On paper it is the best thing about me. It is the thing people lean forward for at dinner.
It was not my voice.
I understand that now in a way I could not then. What I actually had was a predilection for sounds — I could hear a thing and shape myself into it, exactly, and what came out was so convincing that nobody thought to check. Including me.
I was singing with a voice. It just was not my authentic voice. Not at twelve. Not at twenty.
I think about that more than any other part of my history, because it is the failure waiting at the end of every productivity system ever built.
You can get very, very good at producing something that is not yours.
The question that comes before the calendar
So here is the one that has to be answered before the mechanics mean anything.
If the next six months went well — actually well, not impressively — what is different about an ordinary Tuesday?
Not the award. Not the revenue. Tuesday. What time do you get up, what are you working on, who do you talk to, and what is the thing that is finally finished.
If you cannot answer that, the system will faithfully accelerate you toward somebody else's Tuesday. That is not a flaw in the system. Systems hold no opinions. They will deliver whatever you point them at with tremendous efficiency, and if what you have pointed them at is a shape you learned to make because it got approval, they will build you a very productive life you do not want.
I have met a great many extremely organized people in the wrong life. Organized was not the problem. Organized is how they got there so fast.
No coronation
Let me be blunt, because an earlier version of this material got it wrong and I would rather say so out loud than quietly fix it.
Nobody hands you a crown on day thirty. There is no finished person at the end of this who has transcended the whole business and no longer struggles. That fantasy is the old shame in a nicer outfit — the belief that somewhere there is a version of you that counts, and this one is a draft.
What it actually looks like:
You know roughly where the week goes, without dread. Rest is on the calendar before work is, so the week has a floor under it. One or two protected hours most days, pointed at work only you can do. The sock drawer still calls and you recognize the voice now. You still have bad days at about the same frequency, honestly — but a bad day costs a day instead of a fortnight, because the structure holds while you do not.
And on an ordinary Tuesday you are working on something you would have chosen.
That is the sanctuary. It is much quieter than the brochure.
The junkyard
There is another story in the Coach Hype bible I did not understand when it was written.
I am alone on a moon, in a junkyard of dead spaceships, building strange and useless and intricately beautiful things out of scrap. A pristine starliner descends. Celestial beings in shimmering robes step out, silent, perfect. They walk past me to one of my useless sculptures — a kinetic bird made of scrap metal — and they look at it with something like reverence. Then they offer me a single perfect golden tool and ask me to build for them.
I look at the tool. I look at my dirty hands.
And I pick up my own battered hammer and get back to work on my own terms. Later I melt the golden tool down and put the gold into the little robot I keep out there with me, so it has one glowing eye.
I was never an outcast in that story. I was an artist in his sanctuary, and the perfect world needed the imperfect genius, and the point was never the tool.
The point was whose hands were on it.
How I got here
The long way. Six jobs. Community psychology at Georgia State. The Grady Trauma Project at Emory. AvitaCare. A CLCI certification — not for the letters, but because I needed to understand what had been happening to me, and eventually the studying and the living stopped being separate projects.
And my father, after ten years of silence, in a fever window near the end, telling me I was smarter than his degrees because of honesty with kindness. The first time in my life he said he respected me as a man, after a lifetime of portraying me as weak, effeminate, small.
It should not take somebody's death to work out that you deserve love and that you are allowed to flourish.
That sentence is why any of this exists. I had a pile of tactics I had built for myself and for clients, and they only ever lived in my notes and in other people's weeks. They needed a public home. More than one person should be able to reach them.
Level the playing field. That is the whole mission statement and I have never needed a longer one.
If you want it run on your actual week
Everything above is the method and it is free. Some people take it from here and do it alone. That is a completely legitimate outcome and I am glad about it.
Some people want the diagnostic run on their real calendar, by someone who has been inside the coffin and can read the language of their particular mess. That is what a session with me is. One hour, your actual week, and a clear picture of where the hours are going and which single move changes the equation.
No pitch inside it. If we are not a fit, you will know within twenty minutes and so will I.
Nothing is wrong with you. Nobody built you the structure, so you have been holding it up by hand.
Put it down. Let's build the thing that holds it instead.
Start of the series: The Time Coffin