The Season Changed While You Weren't Looking

This is the first one, so a word on what this is.

Richard Bowie is a newsletter about the things we carry, believe, protect, and rarely question. It arrives when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule.

What follows is chapter one of The Season Changed While I Wasn't Looking. It is about a kind of change that never announces itself.

Here it is.

There is rarely a moment.

That may be why we miss so much.

We imagine change as something that happens. A door closes. A decision is made. Someone leaves. Something begins.

But most of life doesn't move that way.

It changes while remaining familiar.

Then occasionally, one afternoon, someone mentions what happened and you realize you haven't thought about it in months.

There was no morning when you stopped being who you were. No afternoon when you became who you are.

You were making coffee. Answering messages. Changing your mind. Getting things wrong. Sleeping. Waking. Living.

Somewhere among all of that, things moved.

A little less of this. A little more of that.

The middle doesn't tell us what it's doing

We like beginnings because we can point to them. Endings too.

The middle is harder.

It doesn't announce itself. It lets you make breakfast. Go to work. Forgive someone a little. Become tired of something you once wanted. Begin enjoying something you once resisted.

All of it happens without ceremony.

Then one day we give it a name. A new season.

As though it began when we noticed.

It didn't. We were already inside it.

The part you can actually check

Here is the test I'd offer you. Not a practice. Just a question.

Something that used to hurt every day.

Does it still hurt every day, or does it hurt every few days now.

That's the whole measurement.

Nobody writes that down, because it isn't dramatic enough to post about and it doesn't come with a certificate.

But the distance between those two sentences is the entire distance between two versions of a person.

And you would have missed it, because it happened while you were looking for something else.

The trap of arriving

Here is the part I keep coming back to.

The moment you decide you have arrived, you've made it a project again.

There's a version of growth that is just another thing to be good at. Another standard to fail. You can spend years trying to meet a version of yourself who is always somewhere ahead, and never once notice that the trying has become the thing you can't put down.

Past where?

There is no place in a life called past this.

Something you understood five years ago can confuse you tomorrow. You can be patient all week and lose your temper on Saturday.

That isn't going backward. That's what a life actually looks like from inside.

There was no morning when you stopped being who you were. No afternoon when you became who you are.

You will want a date for it. There isn't one.