Open the Case

There is a guitar in a closet somewhere — or a canvas, or a notebook, or a folder of half-finished chapters. You know the one I mean. The physical form of the calling you set aside when life became practical.

The case has become significant. You think about it. You feel something when you walk past the closet. The feeling is not simple — it is a combination of longing and guilt and a specific kind of tiredness that is the tiredness of deferred things.

Here is what I want to suggest: you do not have to play. You do not have to create anything. You do not have to have any conversations or make any decisions about your life. You just have to open the case.

What is inside has been waiting for you. Nothing inside has made the decision you are afraid of having made. That decision has not happened yet.

Open the case. See what is there. That is the whole first step. Not the commitment, not the reorganization — just the act of witnessing that the thing still exists and is still what it was.