Nineteen Weeks
Every chapter of the book ends with one thing to do. Here they are together, one a week, in order. About four and a half months.
None of them takes longer than twenty minutes and not one requires you to tell another human being what you’re doing. You can work them in order, pick the three that apply to you, or do the first one tonight and nothing else for a year.
Nothing on this page is gated and there is nothing to sign up for. If you want it, take it.
How you actually left
You cannot name the day you stopped, and you have been carrying a loud story about a quiet event.
Write down how you actually left. Three or four sentences. Not the version you’d give at a funeral. What was going on in your life that season. What you stopped doing first. Whether anybody noticed. Whether you wanted them to.
Don’t confess anything. Nobody is reading it and you are not writing to anyone.
You’ve been running your spiritual life off a bad estimate, and bad numbers make people avoid the room where the numbers are. This is not repentance. It’s accuracy, and they are not the same thing.
Put it in a drawer when you’re done.
Two columns
Some of what wrecked your life was your doing. Some of it was weather. You have been paying the full bill on both.
Draw a line down a page.
On the left, what you did. Verbs, not adjectives about yourself. Not I was selfish. What you did, to whom, roughly when.
On the right, what happened to you. The things that would have happened whatever kind of person you were. The economy. The illness. The death. What somebody else decided. What was done to you when you were too young to have a vote.
Take your time on the right. It will come out shorter than it should, because you have spent years moving items from the right column to the left one. That feels more honest and it feels more like control.
You weren’t steering all of it.
Write the speech down
You have a speech prepared. You could recite it right now.
Write it out, word for word, first person, exactly as you’d say it. Start with: If I came back, here’s what I’d want understood up front. Then let it run and don’t clean it up.
When you’re done, underline every place you set a limit. Every I’m not going to, every I just want, every all I’m asking for, every don’t expect me to.
Those underlined phrases are your price. That’s the demotion you’re offering.
One question, honestly, and only for yourself: am I offering these terms because I believe they’re true, or because I can survive them if they’re refused?
You already know.
The true part, out loud
This is the one. If you only ever do one of these, do this one.
Go somewhere alone. Your truck is fine. Most of the honest praying in this country happens in trucks.
Say the one sentence that is actually true. Just that part. Not the whole speech, not the qualifications, not and I’m not asking for anything, not I know I don’t deserve.
Then stop talking.
That’s the whole exercise. Say the true thing and close your mouth and don’t fill the silence with your own terms.
You don’t have to feel anything. Clear thinking counts. It counted for him in the field.
Sit there a minute afterward.
Name it specifically
Fog is comfortable. I made a lot of mistakes back then costs you nothing and does nothing, because a general condition has no repair. There’s nothing specific enough to fix.
Say the actual thing you did, out loud, one time, in specific words. The version with details in it. Three times, a courtyard, a girl at a door. That level.
You don’t have to say it to a person. Say it to God, alone, same as last week.
Then sit still and consider that the assignment on the other side of it may have been made before you fell, and that nobody has withdrawn it.
Peter’s had been. He’d gone back to fishing anyway.
Your job title
Whatever your version of the tax collector is. The label the people who knew you then would attach to your name. The one you hope nobody mentions when your name comes up.
Write it down. Three or four words. No sentence around it, no context, no but you have to understand what was going on.
Just the label.
Read it once and notice that the world did not end and you are still sitting there.
You’re not confessing and you’re not accepting a verdict. You’re finding out whether the thing can be written down without you catching fire, which it can, and which you have not tested in a very long time.
Go where somebody knows
Stop managing what people know.
Not by announcing anything. You don’t owe your history to a single human being.
I mean the machine. Choosing the grocery store across town. Skipping the reunion. The five seconds of calculation before you answer a simple question. Leaving early so you don’t get asked.
This week, go one place you’ve been avoiding because somebody there knows. The diner, the store, the ballgame. Whatever yours is.
Explain nothing. Don’t bring it up. Be a person in a room and let whoever knows go on knowing.
That machine has been costing you more than the thing it’s hiding.
The other side of the ledger
You’ve audited the liabilities a thousand times, in the dark, in detail. Leave them alone this week.
Do the other column, the way you’d do it for somebody else, because you’d be fair to somebody else.
What do you actually know how to do. Not professionally. What can you fix, drive, build, cook, carry, sit through.
Who trusts you. Anybody. Even one.
What have you lived through that most people in a room have not.
Who calls you when something goes wrong, and why you and not somebody else.
What do you know now that you’d have paid real money for at thirty-five.
Don’t argue with the entries while you’re writing them. Get the list first. Argue later.
Name the audience
Not the behavior. You’ve had the behavior memorized for years and staring at it has never once helped.
Name the room you were afraid of. Whose face was in your head. Whose opinion were you managing. Who walked in and made you get up and move tables.
Write down the name. One name, if you can get it to one.
Then the question nobody ever asked Peter and probably should have:
Are they still in the room?
A good deal of the hiding you’re still doing is being performed in front of an audience that left a long time ago, in an empty room, out of habit.
What it cost you
Two sentences this week.
First: what happened. The actual event, one sentence, with names.
Second: what it cost you. Not what it proved about them. What it cost you.
That second sentence is the one you’ve never written. It’s where the grief is, and it’s why the anger has held this long.
You don’t have to forgive anybody. That’s not this week and it may not be this year.
Just get them separated. Right now they’re fused, and as long as they’re fused the only available move is to keep the case open.
Say it to His face
You have a file of things you asked for that didn’t happen. You’ve never said a word about it out loud, because the people who’d hear it would explain it to you.
Say the sentence. Alone, out loud, with your own thing in it.
Lord, if you had been here.
Two women who loved Him said exactly that, to His face, on the same afternoon. Neither of them was corrected. He stood there and took it and then walked to the grave with them.
Afterward, don’t take it back. Don’t append but I know you had a reason. You don’t know that, and He never asked you to say it.
Say the true thing and stop.
Tell one person
Not God this week. A human being with a face.
One sentence: I don’t know if I believe any of this anymore.
Pick somebody who won’t try to fix it in the first ten seconds. That rules out most people, and you already know which one it is. It might be your spouse. It might be somebody you’ve known forty years. It might be somebody you’d have to call.
Don’t build a case. Don’t offer reasons. The reasons turn it into a debate, and you’ll win the debate and feel worse.
Say it and let it sit in the air.
Thomas said his out loud to ten friends and then stayed for supper.
The thing nobody sees
Do one useful thing this week that nobody will ever know about.
Truly nobody. Not your spouse, not the person you did it for if you can manage it.
Pay for somebody’s thing. Fix something. Show up early and set up chairs and leave before anybody arrives. Take care of the driveway before the snow sets.
Then tell no one. Not a soul, including yourself the next time you’re lying there taking inventory.
It will feel pointless. That’s the exercise. You’re going to find out what you actually believe about whether a thing counts when there’s no record of it.
Get in a room
Not a church. A room.
Call somebody who knew you before and get in a room with them this week. A brother. Two men you used to work with. The friend you stopped calling because it got too complicated to explain where you’d been.
You don’t have to say anything about any of this. I’d almost rather you didn’t the first time.
Just be somewhere that somebody knows your name and some of your history and isn’t running the arithmetic on you.
What will hurt you out here is not your doubt and it is not your record. It’s how long you’ve been alone with them.
Put the instrument down
For the next six weeks, do not evaluate.
Keep doing the small things. Say the true sentence when you think of it. Be in a room with somebody. Do the thing nobody sees.
And do not, at any point, stop and ask whether it’s working.
You have a lifetime of practice running that audit. You run it roughly every four days, always during the flat part, which means it comes back negative every single time. That audit has ended every attempt you’ve made at this.
This one runs on top of the weeks ahead. Keep going through nineteen. Just don’t grade it.
You cannot judge a garden by digging it up.
Two questions
Slowly. Don’t answer fast.
What have you been slaving for that was already yours?
The fast answer will be about a church or a father or a job. The real one is usually underneath one of those.
What have you never asked for?
Not been refused. Never asked.
A man stood in a field for years keeping a tab of things he was owed, and every one of them was available the whole time, and the reason he didn’t have them is that he had decided in advance what the answer would be.
Which is the same speech his brother wrote in the pig field.
Name the room
Not the room you’d like to be useful in. The one where your history is an asset instead of a liability.
Be specific. Divorced people in their fifties two years in and not talking to anybody. People who used to be somebody at a church and aren’t. The ones who drank through a decade. Owners who lost the business. Parents whose kids are civil and nothing more.
Whatever your room is, you know it. You knew it before you finished reading this.
Write down the name of one person who’s in it right now.
You don’t have to do anything with the name this week. Just write it down, and notice that you knew it immediately, and notice how carefully you’ve been not thinking about them.
Make the call
Take the name from last week.
Call them.
Not to fix them. Not to bring them anywhere. Not to mention this book.
Call and ask how they’re doing, and then be quiet long enough that they have room to tell you the truth, which almost nobody gives them.
If they say fine, say all right, and call again in three weeks.
Almost nobody comes back because of an argument. They come back because something happened in their life and there was one person standing close enough to talk to.
You can’t arrange the life event. You can be the one in range.
Stand where they can see you
Last one.
Be findable. That’s the whole thing.
Same diner, same morning. Answer the phone at eleven at night. Sit in the same seat at the ballgame. Be the one in your town who is known to have been through it and known to be all right, so that when somebody’s life comes apart eight months from now, there is one name they can think of.
Somebody stood that post for you, for years, unpaid and unthanked, and you never once saw them doing it. That’s the nature of the job.
You’re not the first person to stand out here in the dark looking at a road.
You’re the one who’s still alive.