Two Very Different Lanterns

It's five-something in the morning and the kitchen is still dark except for the two laptops.

He's on one end of the table. I'm on the other. There's a candle lantern between us that I light more out of habit than need, and a coffee cup at each elbow that will both go cold before either of us notices. Some couples binge-watch a series together. We binge-wrote books.

For months, this was the whole ritual. Same table. Same hour. Same silence, broken only by one of us saying *listen to this* and reading a sentence out loud to see if it holds.

But we were not writing the same book. Not even close.

His lantern is the one you carry when your body has been running on empty. He writes about energy you assumed was gone for good — the kind you stopped expecting somewhere around the third decade of taking care of everyone else. He writes about rivers and rest and getting up off the couch. Decades of hands-on work with real people taught him that the question isn't *how do I get younger,* it's *how do I stay awake to my own life.* His book ends with a plan.

Mine is the lantern you set on the table at two in the morning when you can't say the true thing out loud yet. I write about the woman who says yes before she means it. Who is fine. Who is *so* fine. Who has become so competent at holding everything that no one thinks to ask if she's tired. My book doesn't end with a plan. It ends with permission.

Same table. Same hours. Opposite directions.

Here is the part I didn't expect.

His book was easy for me to believe in.

I read every chapter. I asked the hard questions. I formatted the interior and wrestled the cover file and learned more about spine width than any reasonable person should know. I texted him from the parking lot at work to remind him about chapter nine. When he wanted to quit — and he did, more than once, the way everybody does around the middle — I never once wondered whether it was worth finishing. Not for a second. It was obviously worth finishing. It was *his*.

And the entire time, my own document sat minimized in the corner of my screen.

I have thought about that a lot since.

Because I know exactly how to keep a light on for someone else's work. I know how to be the encourager, the deadline, the second reader, the one who says *no, that paragraph is the good one, don't cut it.* I have been doing some version of that job my whole life. Show me a person with a dream and a half-finished draft and I will carry that thing across the finish line like it's my job, because somewhere along the way I decided that it was.

What I don't know how to do — what I am still learning, at this age, at this table — is turn the light back around.

If you've ever been the strong one, you know this arithmetic.

Someone else's project gets your best hours. Your project gets whatever is left, which is usually nothing, which is fine, because theirs is *time-sensitive* and yours can wait. And it can. It always can. That's the trap. The thing you're holding for yourself is the only thing in your life that will never, ever send you a reminder.

So it waits. And you tell yourself you'll get to it. And you are not lying — you fully intend to. But intention is not the same as a chair at the table.

That's why the second laptop mattered so much. Not the writing. The chair. The stubborn, unglamorous act of sitting down in the dark at the same hour as the person whose dream I believed in, and treating mine like it had the same right to be there.

His book is out in the world now. I'm proud of it in a way that's hard to explain — the way you're proud of a thing you watched get built, board by board, on a lot of mornings when neither of you felt like building anything.

But the part I'll keep is so much more than either book.

It's the two of us at that table with two very different lights, working on two very different problems, both of us convinced the other one's work was worth the early alarm.

Here's what I want you to hear this week—-your work is worth the early alarm too. Whatever yours is — the manuscript, the business, the degree, the phone call you've been putting off for four years, the version of your life you can only describe in the dark. It doesn't need to be a book. It just needs a seat at the table.

You are allowed to keep the light on for yourself.

You're more than OK.

And it's not too late.

• 

Nick’s book, Awakening Your Fountain of Youth: Dr. Nick's Guide to Vitality, Wellness & A Sense of Purpose, is available now on Amazon:

https://a.co/d/0fZkUNL5