Until You See It
To break the structure, someone must see the structure first.
Some people say you should write toward a question you don’t have the answer to yet. I don’t work like that now. I used to.
I learned along the way that why isn’t the right question. What worked, and what it cost - that’s closer. Some of it worked, for a while. Then it didn’t.
I’ve worked in two different businesses of my own. Both times I started with the wrong premise. I started with a question. And followed the desire to answer that question. They were good questions.
What people don’t tell you about desire is that it’s large. It pulls. It’s heck of a vague. So you buy this, you do that. You design this, get it made. You’re unsure. What, you don’t know. The clock is ticking. You don’t wait.
Once the decision is made, or because things just are the way they are, you work around it. More so when the bottom line chases you as much as the staff salaries do, and nothing squeezes tighter than needing that profit to cover your own pay too.
I felt punished for it - punished for reaching, when what actually needed correcting wasn’t the reaching at all. It was the question - a good one, real, and worth asking. Desire is just what you reached for, because it was already there, and the thing that would have actually answered the question - time, patience, data - wasn’t.
Both times, I kept moving because stopping felt like failing everyone already depending on the motion. Including me. My pride to be right. Not because the motion was still right. I couldn’t see it - not because I’m blind or stupid, but because I built the walls in the beginning.
Why gets asked way too much - gurus teach you to find yours, as if there’s only one why sitting underneath everything. But mine never came as one. They arrive as a series of data points. Experiences. Through a conversation over text. Doing a workshop. Real feedback. Ask why and desire answers in about four seconds, and the answer is always true and always useless - of course I want it, or of course I don’t. Wanting was never the problem.
This time I didn’t start with a question at all - not why, not when. I just did the smallest thing I could and followed the impulse. It’s only after I gathered enough data points that I could see the rough outline of what it was pointing to. It only looks like a question now, from here: have I actually built the floor this needs to stand on, or am I about to ask something to hold weight it isn’t built to hold yet.
I’ve done this many times over the years - bought domain names. I haven’t done that for two years. I have a notebook full of journals and notes and half-written essays. Some of it published as fiction. Much more unwritten. But I have the floor. I already knew what I was going to do. I asked for help to build the framework first, in git, with no code of my own - the smallest, least glamorous version of the thing. It ran on a staging server until I was sure. Then I felt the impulse again. It needs an address.
The art of small things is about seeing. To break the structure, someone must see the structure first - not the plan, the floor underneath it, the one that only comes into view once enough small things have already happened. The desire can stay as large and vague as it always was - it doesn’t need shrinking. It was never going to show me the structure. The data did.