Flow

I am living on the money I saved for retirement. I don't know where the next paying work will come from. When a recruiter writes, I write back, but I've stopped going looking. If it comes to it I will live in my truck. I've thought about the truck more carefully than you'd expect, and I'd be happy in it, as long as what I was doing in there was the LORD's will.

That is the least impressive thing about me. It took a man with a PhD and fifteen years of good work this long to believe a sentence a child could memorize. Take no thought for your life, what you will eat; nor for your body, what you will put on. I read it in the Spring. I sat with the gospel four months. Then one day, and I couldn't find the day again on a calendar, I stopped hedging and did what it said.

Everything changed after that. Not the circumstances. Those got thinner, not safer. What changed was that the work started moving through me again.

I used a word for that for years, and the word was doing me harm.

The state I mean is not ease. It doesn't feel like grace and it doesn't feel like peace. What it is, is not deciding. The part of me that weighs one approach against another and picks, the part I spent a career sharpening, goes quiet, and the work comes out through my hands faster than I could have argued my way to it, and none of it is me choosing. That's all it is. A decisionless state.

It makes no promises about where it takes you. It isn't a sign that things are about to go well, and it isn't a reward for getting something right. It is a very good state for doing hard things in, and it can take you anywhere at all.

I know that because it took me to a hospital.

It was January. I was on a client project: my own consultancy, my own hours, nobody to tell me when to stop. I had a dozen or so Claude Code sessions open and I cycled through them, building three things at once. A harness for labeling data for a computer vision pipeline. A command-line tool for spec-driven development. The model and the inference pipeline for the vision project itself. Each one was refined against the other two, and all of it was moving at the speed of thought. Not deciding, just building, the thing assembling itself under me. It felt good. I was having fun. There was no friction in it anywhere, nothing to push against. I did not sleep for nine days.

That is not a figure of speech. There was no vision in it and no message. I was enjoying myself, and I didn't stop.

The tool for spec-driven development was a piece of software of my own, built mostly by not deciding, and it held together in a way my careful work rarely does. Then I did the one thing in that whole stretch I can point to and say I decided it. I drew up a C-corp and pointed the software at law and finance, where the money was.

At the end of the nine days I was in a mental hospital.

I was there two days. What I learned was humility, which I would not have gone looking for and would not have taken from anyone offering it. I had spent my life being the smartest person available. Nine days of feeling wonderful had walked me into a locked ward, and there was no version of the story I could tell in there in which I had been in charge and it had gone well.

There was one television on the ward, and it was showing Aliens. Nobody who worked there seemed to have thought about that. I confronted one of the orderlies and told him to put on something more uplifting. He told me to go to my room. I stood there a moment, and then, since I was there to learn obedience, I turned around and went to my room.

I was not being punished. The ward was not the bill for the nine days. I have gone back over all of it, the nine days and the two, looking for the place where it stopped being the path, and there isn't one. I was being taught the whole way. The locked ward is where I learned the thing I most needed and would never have agreed to learn, and I don't know another door it could have come through.

So the state doesn't tell you that you're following. And where the road comes out doesn't tell you either. Where a road comes out is not evidence about whether you were being led down it.

Here is what happened after the two days, in order. The order is the only argument I have.

I came out of the ward holding one thing: I had been led the whole way, including into it. I could not make that understandable to my wife, and I don't think it was hers to understand. I was the one who had been inside it. What I was asking her to accept was that the worst nine days of our life together had been instruction, and I couldn't explain how then and I can't now. I asked her for a divorce.

Then I went back to my client's project and finished it. That took several weeks, and the whole time the software of my own was coming apart. The agents that had been building it with me were tearing it apart, and I made a mess I couldn't dig out of. When the client's work was done I gave the software away, out where anyone could have it, and not for a strategic reason. I hadn't made it alone, and putting my name on it as the owner felt like lying. It started moving again once I let it go. I didn't think anything of that at the time.

In February I left the house in Gulfport, Florida. I was going to move to San Francisco. New York was ten days on the way.

On one of the ten days I came down to the hotel lobby and there was a group of founders in it, working. Cohort NYC, though I didn't know that yet. Once a week they take over a hotel lobby and build their companies in it, together, in public.¹ I sat down. Nothing was decided. I just could not, after that afternoon, get San Francisco back into focus. I stayed.

The next day I was meeting a friend who teaches at Cornell Tech, which is on Roosevelt Island, which is a place I had no reason ever to go. I stepped off the train and fell in love with it. That took about four seconds.

After lunch I started walking north. I went into the lobby of every apartment building on the way and asked for the leasing agent. Every building. I passed a small stone chapel and went into that too. Nobody was there but a public safety officer in the basement. I asked her if I could see the pastor. She said no one was in, and I could come back Sunday.

The first building that answered was Manhattan Park. The leasing agent went back and forth between the lobby and their office, asking for bank statements, then for proof that my dog was a service animal, then making copies of everything I had handed over. I signed a lease that day and moved in two days later, on a Saturday.

Sunday it snowed, and I went back. It was the first church service of my life.

I have looked for the place in those weeks where I decided something and I can't find one. It is the same state as the nine days. There is no difference in the feel of it. I wasn't weighing anything. I was taking the next thing in front of me and then the next one, out of a marriage, out of a house, into a lobby, onto a train, up a street, into a chapel in the snow.

You'd like it to be two roads. One ends in a locked ward and one ends in a pew, and you can tell which is which by where they come out. I'd like that too. It is one road, and the ward and the pew are both on it, and I was being taught in both. If I had been shown the pew and not the ward I'd have learned half of it, and it would have been the easy half.

None of it was easy, and none of it looked good from outside while it was happening. I did not come out of a hospital, end my marriage, give away my work, and move to an island I had never seen because things were going well for me. Leaving my wife was the hardest thing I have done. The house in Gulfport was my home. Nothing about those weeks felt like being carried. It felt like walking north in a strange city asking strangers about apartments, which is what it was.

The one thing I can find that runs through all of it, the nine days and the two days and the weeks after and the walk and the snow, is that I was learning the entire time. That is not the same as it going well. It is better than it going well.

So here is how I work now. Mostly it is a way of getting out of the way.

When I don't know what to do, a function that won't come, a paragraph that won't turn, a pool shot I can't see, I stop. I get still: the mind first, then the heart, and last the body, which never wants to. And I don't ask for the thing I want. I stopped asking for things. I ask for clarity, for the next right move, and nothing past it.

It comes small. Never the whole design handed down. The next function, the next line, the one shot in front of me. I make that move, and from there I can see a little further, and I ask again. Whole days of good work go by like this, and at the end of them I couldn't honestly tell you I decided any of it.

The asking is the only part I actually do. You're thinking the asking would have kept me out of the ward. I don't believe that. It isn't insurance. The asking is admitting that I'm not the one who knows, and I couldn't have admitted that before the ward, because before the ward I still thought I was. The praying started where the being-in-charge stopped. The ward is where I learned to ask.

I never get to stay in it. The flow doesn't break, it leaks. One minute the work is moving through me, and the next I notice, always a beat late, that I'm the one steering again, gripping a wheel I'd let go of. The noticing is the whole skill. The second I catch it I can do the one thing that works: stop, get still, ask again. Still, ask, move, drift, notice, still again. That isn't the interruption of the work. It's the work.

I don't have a summit to report from. I'm a man who keeps grabbing the wheel back, spending down his retirement, answering the recruiters, eyeing the back of his truck. I don't want what I used to want. I don't need my name on the work. I want to be handed the next thing, and to watch where it goes.

Seek first the kingdom, Jesus said, and all these things shall be added unto you. I'm still finding out what He meant by all these things. So far it has been an island, a chapel, and a hotel lobby full of strangers.

If it comes to the truck, I'll write to you from the truck.

Cohort NYC — a New York community whose weekly Wednesday coworking sessions gather founders, builders, and researchers; it describes its aim as making "a genuine home community" for people who build on ideas, rather than networking. luma.com/Cohort.nyc ↩

Footnotes