“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Bertrand Russell*

In my last Reflection I asked: useful to whom? The question behind the question was really about measurement, and who gets to do it. Russell’s observation takes that somewhere else. It doesn’t ask whether time is useful. Rather it asks whether it is enjoyed. Which is a rather different standard.

I left my law firm nearly twelve years ago. It was the right decision. I had work lined up, consulting opportunities were emerging, and trustee roles were accumulating. On paper, the transition looked straightforward; in practice, it wasn't quite so simple. The difficulty wasn't the work itself. Rather it was the gap between knowing I'd made the right choice and feeling comfortable with it. Knowing you've earned the right to step back doesn't make stepping back immediately comfortable.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in his newsletter The Imperfectionist, reaches back to a book title that stopped me: Rabbi Alan Lew's This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. Burkeman's point, characteristically, is not to alarm. Uncertainty, he argues, is not a temporary inconvenience. It is our basic state of existence. We are never ready. Not really. And waiting until we are ready is, in the end, just another way of not beginning.