Seven—Arriving
I often leave with more than I arrived with. I’m not sure I can fully account for that. I don’t do very much, in the way that doing is usually measured. I don’t fix anything or guide anyone toward a predetermined destination. I’m simply myself—which turns out, in this context, to be enough. More than enough.
What I seem to have is something I can’t entirely explain and am not sure I could teach. Not the knowledge—that can be passed on. Not the boundaries or the patience or the understanding of how men work when they finally stop performing. Those are learnable. But the particular combination of history and temperament and hard-won indifference to the mirror that makes a man comfortable enough in his own skin to make another man comfortable in his—I don’t know how you arrive at that except by the long route.
I have a finite amount of time. That’s the only thing about this work that gives me pause.
Because the need is not finite. The men are everywhere—on the cusp of something, carrying their questions, waiting for a room that doesn’t exist yet in their lives. Most of them will never find one. They’ll manage, the way men manage, which is to say they’ll carry it quietly and competently and at some cost that nobody around them will ever quite see.
The book is for them. Not a substitute for the room—nothing is that. But the next closest thing. A place where a man can read himself clearly, perhaps for the first time, and find that what he reads isn’t shameful or strange or in need of correction.
Just a man. With a body. With wants. With questions he deserves to have answered.
That’s all. That’s enough.
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