For There Is Much To Do

I do what I love, and still I feel like I’m drowning.
Not in failure, but in motion, in the endless ache of momentum that won’t let me stop.
I finish one thing, then another, then another, as if completion were an emperor I might one day please, as if the mountain of my effort might finally sprout a summit, a view, a reason to rest.

But pride does not come.
Not when the page is full.
Not when the task is done.
Not even when the work is good… especially not then.
Because the moment I finish, the moment I create, I abandon what I made
and turn my face again to the waiting hunger of what is still undone.

The days pass like teeth through flesh,
clean, precise, and without ceremony.
I never stop long enough to bury what I’ve completed with grace or gratitude;
I barely even scatter the dirt over its back
before I’ve moved on to dig the next shallow grave of whatever task awaits.
No headstone. No reverence. No pause to say, “You mattered. You were enough.”

And I say I love this life. I say I’m lucky.
And I am, God knows I am.
But somehow love has become a duty I report to,
a weight I carry instead of a warmth I rest in.
Even my joy is rationed out in minutes and margins,
scheduled between obligations like it, too, is just another box to check.
I go for the walk, I look at my daughter too
but I’m already counting the seconds until I can get back to the work,
because maybe if I finish what needs doing,
then I’ll earn the right to feel what I just missed.
And so the moment of joy passes unlived,
filed away like an unread letter.
I try to remember I’m alive,
but I’m too busy for the proof and
too far gone into motion to feel the beat of my own heart.

There is so much to do that I forget to be done.
So much to reach for that I forget to have or to hold.
So much to build that I forget to stand inside the thing I've built and feel its warmth
before tearing it down with my own hands and calling it progress.

And I tell myself I’ll rest once it’s finished.
Once I’m finished.
But it’s never finished because I never am and I’m not because it never is.
Because rest feels like a kind of dying
when you’ve taught yourself that your value only lives in your doing.

I keep thinking one more day of this,
one more task crossed out,
and then I’ll feel it, right? That surge, that rising breath, that slow, soft voice that says,
“You did it. You can stop now, even if it’s just for a moment. You’ve earned the sunlight.”

But that never comes.
The praise I crave cannot find me,
because I have built no space where it is allowed to stay.

I want to be present and to write. I want to be still and feel accomplished.
I want to feel the life I’ve fought so hard to shape,
to taste the joy inside the thing I’ve made,
not just race past it on the way to more.

But presence cannot survive in exile,
and I have exiled it for years in the name of purpose.
I have confused urgency for meaning,
and called it virtue.
I have abandoned the freedom I claimed to be chasing,
and now I do not know how to return to it.

Why is it so easy to see my work as an important thing that needs to be done,
but not this moment?
This quiet coffee, this breath, this glance out the window where nothing demands me?
Why can I not see that living, too,
is a task that needs doing?

I want to believe it.
I want to begin again,
not with more effort, but with permission.
To create because I love it,
and then let go for a moment.
To rest not as a reward,
but as an act of grace.

To live a life that does not apologize for its pauses,
that does not treat stillness like failure,
or joy like something that must be bought with exhaustion.
To finish something and stand beside it,
not as its architect or slave,
but simply as a witness to what was made.
To say aloud and without flinching
“That was enough. And so am I.”

No, I am not there. I don’t believe yet that I am.
But I can at least recognize that now.
And there is power in that, somewhere.
Perhaps something soft has stirred beneath the grind,
a small and patient blooming beneath the weight of my motion,
a root pressing upward in the dark.
When my growth comes,
I pray I will not trample it
in my rush to become worthy of it.
I pray I will see the petal for what it is,
a brief, bright mercy in a life that almost forgot how to look.

Even if just for a moment.
Even if the moment trembles, and flees.
Even if I do not know what to do with stillness
when it finally arrives.

Forgive me, my love, if I have felt far away.
It is not my heart that’s distant,
only the body that keeps moving to prove my heart is worth loving.
Only the part of me that believes
love must be earned with labor,
and worth proven through the ache of never arriving.

But I am still here.
Some part of me has stayed beneath the static.
Some thread has held, even through the noise.

And this… this poem,
felt like touching that thread.
Felt like a breath that did not need to be earned.
Felt like a door cracking open, even slightly.

But the clock calls.
And the list grows louder.
And I…
I must go now.
For there is much to do.