After the crisis

For months, a client of mine was in crisis mode.

He was looking for work. The bills were piling up. Every day had one question in it, and it was loud.

Now the work has finally come. Steady. Decent.

When we spoke recently, he told me people are telling him he is doing a good job. The crisis is over. Mission succeeded.

But his days are feeling mundane. The day-to-day has been dragging on him.

Boredom is settling in, quickly becoming his new normal.

That’s an uncomfortable thing to admit. He fought hard for this stability. The need was real, and it mattered. But now that he has it, he feels flat.

Underneath the boredom, he told me, he is longing for something. But he doesn’t know what.

For months, the only question had been how to pay the bills. Now that it’s answered, a deeper question has become audible.

This deeper question has been there the whole time, but it doesn’t send a bill or set a deadline. And that makes it insidious. It can wait for years, and if nobody listens, it will.

Our urgent needs demand our attention.
Our deeper needs require us to give it.

From the inside, a need like this doesn’t feel like a need. It feels like boredom. Or restlessness. Or a vague sense that you should be happier than you are.

The crisis had been hard. It had also been simple. There was one problem, and every day pointed at it.

The crisis decided what mattered. But stability hands that question back to you.

And that can be harder in its own way.

So I asked him what he might want to build, now that he isn’t fighting to cover the bills. What becomes possible from here. Not as a goal to pressure himself with. As a direction to guide him.

For the next few weeks, he won’t try to fix the boredom. He’ll pay attention to it instead. No pressure to know what it means yet.

Just notice where it seems to point.

Thanks for reading. If stability has handed a question back to you lately, I’d love to hear about it.

— Michael