The wind and the standing: calm inside the storm

Manuel Nogueira on calm water, agitated water, and five in the morning.

The coffee in front of me has stopped moving. (Yes, the same one.) I set it down maybe forty seconds ago and watched the surface tremble itself flat. 5am, or a bit after. The phone in my pocket buzzed twice in that window. Already. Different time zones. I didn’t pick it up. The coffee, basically water at this hour anyway, settled, and now I can see the sky outside in it, slightly bent.

Calm water reflects the world. Agitated water doesn’t. The kind of sentence you’d find on a yoga studio wall and dismiss in two seconds. The physics is real, though. A surface in motion can’t show you what’s around it. It’s too busy showing you what just happened to it.

Lately, everyone is the agitated water. I am, most days. The notification, the unread, the message I haven’t replied to, the client who replied to say they went in another direction, the A.I. model that dropped six hours ago and is already obsolete, the dinner with clients, the deck, the all of it.

Um furacão, sempre. No meio do furacão, uma calma estranha.

That’s what I want to sit with. The wind is everywhere already, free, automatic, you don’t need to subscribe. What I’m after is the thing in the middle of the spinning that doesn’t spin.

Almost none of my actual suffering is coming from outside. The market accelerates. Inboxes fill. The AIs improve weekly, although “improve” is a word I’m less sure about every quarter. My son keeps growing. The parents age with their illness as expected. The clients decide their things. None of that is hostile to me. It’s weather.

What hurts is what I add. The clenched jaw waiting for the reply. The looped story about why the deal didn’t close, told to nobody, on repeat, in the shower, in the Uber. The chest tightening because someone shipped on the same day I was supposed to. The phone-checking that doesn’t even pretend to be functional anymore, just a body looking for ground in a wind it can’t stop.

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The wind, I can’t do anything about. The way I stand in it, maybe.

There’s something deeper under the resistance, and it’s hard to know it’s there and at the same time keep forgetting. The reason the unanswered email cuts isn’t that a project is in danger. It’s that I have, somewhere along the way, started to confuse myself with the project. With the role. With the version of me performing the role on the platform everyone is watching. When the client goes quiet, what’s threatened is the mask. A piece made of approval, held together by attention. The surface has to keep moving or it stops existing. The mask works the way agitated water works. It can’t show you anything except what just happened to it. The last comment. The last quiet client. The last post that didn’t perform.

E aí vem a pergunta: o que você vai ser se não for isso?

I notice this on the days I wake up early enough to be in front of the page before the day turns on. There’s a window, call it 5 to 6, where nothing is asking anything of me yet, the water in the glass is still, and I can see the day in it. By 9am I’m reactive. By noon I’m a different person. By 6pm I’m almost entirely a function of what landed in the inbox, probably poisoned by the giant wave of stimulation the day carries. The shift between those states does not come from the outside. It’s me.

The temptation, when you notice this, is to slow down. To withdraw. Call it depth. Wrong answer. The same illness with the symptoms inverted, the romantic version of paralysis. You can’t move with what’s coming if you’re rigid. The tense body gets hit harder. The body that’s actually still, not pretending, sees the punch a fraction of a second earlier and steps. Same physics as the coffee. The still body sees what’s around it. The tense one sees what just hit it.

That’s the practice. Looseness inside the storm. Calma no meio do furacão, com a porta aberta e o trabalho em cima da mesa sendo afetado por esse vento todo.

All that thought took less than a minute. The coffee is still there. I have no idea if the phone kept buzzing, my mind was elsewhere. Seven more, apparently. I don’t really know what else I’m trying to say beyond this, the storm isn’t going anywhere and I’m addicted to it at this point, and most of what we suffer about it is what we add to it from the inside, which is a small and useless thing to know once you’re already in the wind. It’s something else if you remember it at 5something am, before the day gets loud, and let the coffee settle for a minute before you start.