I left my job in aughty-two with one fresh thing in mind: that life, existence, was more than just having a job and eking fun in the off-hours.

I started devoting myself to the difference between "work" and "my work." Work was an obligation, it was time in service. "My work" meant laboring on the things I was curious about.

And I was surprised, in the first months out, that life could be more than just "my work," too. It could be dawdling in the spring-moist bushes of the arboretum, idling at the cafe watching the regulars high-fiving the staff, bussing down to an art gallery and contemplating destruction. And none of it in the service of creative work, either. Just living.

Reading a letter from your father in the public library, a letter about history, and trying to write a letter back.

Keeping the space safe while the children got ready to leave school.

We were children then. Everyone I knew was free. There was no urgency to time. We got up to do the next thing as soon as we felt like it. We lived cheap, made our own dinner, kept up old clothes—we kept our lifestyle going.

To think that life was more than one's creative work, and that it was really, firstly, about noticing, enjoying, feeling and doing the right thing. That it could be about raising children, being a good friend a good neighbor. Absorbing the changes in the world, too, and being a good neighbor in each new world, each new month's world.