I was journaling last week about what to do with my Substack Where the Road Bends. I’ve been wondering whether to keep it alive alongside Field Notes or sunset it.
As the writing session unfolded, I noticed a part of me that wanted to protect it at all costs.
You can't just throw five years of hard work away, Steve. Look at what we've built. We have eleven thousand subscribers and seventy essays we're ridiculously proud of. We've poured thousands of hours into thinking, drafting, and polishing this body of work. How can you walk away now?!?
I couldn’t really argue with this voice. There really is a lot I’d be leaving behind.
Then, at the end of that rant, an unexpected question came to me.
If nothing lasts forever, including the words I'm writing right now, what does that mean for Where the Road Bends? What does that mean for everything I create?
I've been writing on the internet for sixteen years. My first blog, started in 2010, was called Schlaf Notes. It no longer exists. I moved my writing to Medium and then eventually to Substack. Through the years, I archived or deleted dozens of posts that no longer matched what I was interested in or who I was becoming. Most now live in a file buried somewhere in iCloud, and some are still on Medium behind a paywall. There are plenty of posts and essays I've completely forgotten about. A few, especially those on Substack, have had staying power, but most haven't.
I turn forty-seven in a month. I’ve lived long enough to put a lot of things into the world and watch them find an audience, matter deeply for a time, and eventually recede. When I put them out there, they felt like my entire world, and, in many ways, they were.
There’s a middle-aged woman down the road with a magnificent garden. Every April I see her in her yard with an oversized trash barrel, clearing away what the winter left behind and getting ready for another season. A few weeks later, I see her working the soil, flanked by her tools and boxes of seedlings. By July, the garden is overflowing. She’s out there after work most evenings, watering, weeding, pruning, and tending the garden. Fall is coming now, and her small plot of land will go dormant through the winter. In the spring, she'll be back with the barrel.
For most of my career, I've longed to create companies, products, and essays that would outlast me. I wanted to leave something behind, something that would persist and reverberate long after I was gone.
But then it dawned on me last week, as I was driving by that woman’s garden: she's out there because she loves working the soil and tending the plants, not because her garden will last forever. It won't even make it to November, and she knows it, but she gardens anyway.
I can see how much I've let outcome and legacy shape my choices. I've pursued projects and roles because of their potential, even when I didn't particularly enjoy the pursuit.
I'm starting to wonder what would happen if I only said yes to work I truly loved or that felt nourishing.
As I come to accept that nothing I produce or write will last forever, I'm beginning to ask a different question. Is this where I want to spend my limited energy and time? Maybe what I make ends up being an expression of one stretch of my life. Like her garden this season.
With this realization, I can already feel myself becoming less attached to outcomes. I think about my long-form essays on Where the Road Bends. There was always the same pattern: creative tension and angst while I wrote, anticipation while it sat with my editor, and relief when it finally went out. And then I would check the numbers over and over to see how many likes, reposts, and new subs it drove.
But now, with these notes, I share the links, read them once on my own site, and file them away. That's it. No checking stats or focusing on the results. A few times I've gone back and read an old one, not to see how it did, but to see how it lands on me now.
I'm trying to stay focused on the creative process because that's what I find deeply satisfying and enlivening. I want to put love into what I make, share it with you, and let that be enough.
This is an entirely new way of working for me and it's still taking root, but I can feel how much lighter it is.