The System Before It Had a Name

It’s been a busy week. Moving. Work. Life. I don’t have as much time to write as I would like to. But the wanting to write hasn’t gone anywhere.

Last week I told you about Mr. Winter, and I spent most of that thanking him for what he did with that saxophone, a small office, and three years of weekly lessons. But the saxophone was never really the point, and I think I’ve known that for a long time without ever saying it out loud. What he gave me in that room wasn’t music. It was a way to walk up to something too big to take in all at once and not turn around.

The first time I remember it showing up again was in constitutional law, during college. The course was taught by another of the people who leave a mark on you, my pre-law advisor back then and, later, once I started teaching myself, a mentor all over again. Like every good teacher, he took us where we were and expected us to become something more. The reading was heavy and the volume was heavier, and there were nights it looked like a wall with no door in it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing Mr. Winter had taught me without ever putting a name to it. I worked at it a little each day. I didn’t try to understand all of constitutional law by Friday. I just tried to understand a little more than I had the morning before, and then I did that again.

The same lesson followed me into law school, where nearly every course began with more material than it seemed possible to absorb. Contracts, property, civil procedure, torts. Each one had its own language, its own rules, and its own way of making you feel behind before you had even started. There was no way to understand all of it at once, so I stopped trying. I read the next case, learned the next rule, and came back the next day. By then, the method had become familiar, even if I still didn’t understand where it had come from.

The bar exam was more of the same, only bigger. I sat down in front of a body of law that no one could hold in their head all at once, and I pounded at it. Each day I knew a little more than I had the day before. I never felt myself getting ready. There was no afternoon when it all came together and I suddenly knew I would pass. I just kept moving forward a little at a time, and when the results finally came, I found out that all those small mornings had added up to something.

In school, the lesson was easier to see. There was always a syllabus, a test date, or a professor telling you what came next. Life isn’t nearly so organized. It doesn’t divide itself into chapters or tell you when you’ve learned enough to move on. Most of the time, you don’t even recognize the lesson while you’re living it.

The version of it that mattered most, though, started with this blog. A few years ago I took an honest look at where I was, and I knew I wasn’t happy there. I knew what the outcome had to be. I’ve told you the why before and I won’t tell all of it again, because the why was never the hard part. The hard part was smaller than that. All that was left was to start.

So I started. I did one thing on one day, and then I did it again the next day, and again the day after that. I didn’t stand on the scale every morning waiting for something to happen, because nothing happens that way. What happens instead is a slow line you can’t see while you’re on it. You only see it when you turn around.

That’s the part nobody told me. I never felt the progress arrive. I felt the work, and most days the work didn’t feel like much. The change happened quietly, out of sight, while I was busy doing the next small thing. Then I looked back and there it was, sitting in a photograph or a pair of pants or a few thousand mornings of walking, and I realized there was never going to be one dramatic moment. There were only ordinary days that accumulated into a different life.

Over the years I’ve read a lot of people who put names and systems around the same idea, that nothing real changes all at once. James Clear writes about habits. Tony Robbins talks about decisions followed by action. The Stoics remind us to spend our energy on what we can control and let go of what we can’t. I’ve read them, studied them, underlined them, and tried to apply what they taught. It took me a long time to realize they weren’t introducing me to a new way of thinking. They were giving language to something I’d already learned decades earlier in a little office with a saxophone. Mr. Winter had already shown me the system. He just never called it one. Decide who you want to become, then act on it, even if the action is small, because deciding and acting are the only two things you ever actually control. Everything else, how fast the change comes, whether anyone notices, what the world does while you’re busy showing up, was never yours to manage in the first place.

It’s why I’m still deciding to sit down every Saturday morning and make the next one. The time is shorter now, but the method hasn’t changed. A little at a time is the only way I’ve ever built anything worth keeping. Mr. Winter never talked about habits or discipline or Stoicism. He just kept pointing at the next measure and saying, “Again.” It took me most of a life, and more than a few books, to understand that he wasn’t only teaching me the saxophone. He was teaching me how to live.