listen.

nobody is coming to ask you how it is in there.

the boss won't ask. the landlord won't ask.

the man behind the counter pouring your coffee won't ask.

the world wants your hands and your hours and your money,

and it does not care about the thing that wakes at three in the morning

and stands at the foot of the bed

and looks at you.

but that thing is you.

more you than your name. more you than your work.

more you than the face you put on to get out the door.

everything else is rented.

the inner life is the one thing they cannot bill you for

and the one thing you keep forgetting to live in.

they sell you a hundred ways to skip it.

the drink. the scroll. the late shift. the next thing, the next thing.

and all of it works, for an hour.

then you are back in the kitchen at midnight

with the hum of the refrigerator

and whatever it is you have been carrying

is still sitting there in the chair across from you,

waiting, the way the truth waits,

patient as a dog.

people think the inner life is a luxury,

something for the rich, the idle, the soft.

it is the opposite.

the man who never looks inside

is the one most easily led, most easily sold,

most easily ruined by a feeling he never bothered to name.

you do not get to skip the inner life.

you only get to live it badly or live it awake.

so take it seriously.

too seriously.

the way you take a wound seriously,

the way you take hunger seriously,

the way you take a person you love seriously

when they finally tell you the truth.

you do not need a clinic to begin.

you do not need to call yourself broken,

or a warrior, or a project, or a work in progress.

you are a person, sitting down, with a pen,

trying to find out what is actually happening to you.

that is the whole of it.

that is enough. that has always been enough.

write the thing down. not to fix it. just to look at it.

the looking is the work.

the worried mind that gets a sentence on paper

is a quarter inch further from the loop than it was,

and a quarter inch, on a bad night, is the whole distance.

nobody escapes the hard passage.

the grief comes. the burnout comes. the love ends.

the only question worth asking

is whether you went through it as a stranger to yourself

or as someone who paid attention.

so pay attention.

give the inner life a chair and a lamp and an honest hour.

it has been talking to you your whole life.

the least you can do, now, in the difficult passage,

is sit down and listen.