The Line Around The Morning

The alarm still goes off at ten past six, because she never changed it.

For twenty-two years that alarm was the first brick in a wall of bricks. The kettle. Two lunchboxes, one of them with the crusts off long after it should have been. The blue coat that lived on the third hook and nowhere else. Fifteen minutes in the car with the radio down low because one of them could not bear the news. The same corner by the postbox. Home by nine, the shop, the washing, the school gate again at twenty past three. She could have done it in her sleep, and for a good part of the last decade she more or less did.

She used to say, to anyone who asked, that she would love one single week with nothing in it.

In September she got the rest of her life with nothing in it.

The younger one went in a van full of duvets and a lamp that was never going to survive the journey. The house made a sound it had not made before, which was no sound. And the next morning the alarm went off at ten past six and she lay there in the dark and thought, with something that was almost excitement: I can do anything I want.

So she did nothing. For six weeks.

Not dramatically. Nothing anybody would have noticed from outside. She got up at half nine, then at ten, then whenever. She ate standing up at the counter. She started three books. Whole days went past that she could not have described to you at the end of them, and the freedom she had wanted for twenty-two years turned out to be a room with no walls in it, and she could not work out where to stand.

So in January she did the other thing.

She bought the planner. Hardback, dated, with the little ribbon sewn in. She followed a woman on the internet with a whiteboard and a five o'clock alarm and the face of a person who has never once eaten standing up. Day one was tremendous. Day two she was awake at five and flattened by eleven. Day five she cried in the shower, which was not on the schedule. Day nine she put the planner in the drawer under the tea towels, and she has not opened it since, and on top of everything else she felt ashamed of herself for being unable to keep a list that a stranger could keep.

It is August now. The alarm still goes off at ten past six because she never changed it, and she lies there and does the sum again, and it comes out the same both ways.

She said it out loud to the kettle one morning, and it is the truest thing she has said all year.

I want either total freedom or somebody to tell me exactly what to do. And neither one works.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because something got taken out from under you as well, and it may not have been a school run. A job that told you what a Tuesday was for. A marriage. A building you did not have to invent a shape for, because it already had one. A body that used to decide the day and does not decide it any more.

Somebody or something moved out of a room in your life and the whole timetable went with them, and you have spent the months since swinging between two things that both promised you freedom, and neither one has handed you any.

The line was never the punishment

David is a man writing about land.

Not gardening. Land in the old sense, the sort that came to a family by lot and stayed with them, and the words he reaches for are the words of a survey. Portion. Cup. Lot. And then the one that gives the whole thing away.

The Lord, You are my portion and my cup. You hold my lot in Your hand. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Yes, I have a beautiful inheritance.Psalm 16:5, 6

The Holy Spirit kept a surveyor’s vocabulary inside a song of gladness, and the lines are the measuring cords. Rope with knots in it, dragged over open ground by two men, laid down so that here is where your field stops and your neighbor's begins.

Look at what he is grateful for. He is not thanking God that there is no rope. He is thanking God for where the rope fell.

Because without a cord there is no field. There is only ground. Ground goes on for ever and belongs to nobody and grows nothing on purpose, and a man standing in the middle of it with a bag of seed has all the freedom in the world and nowhere to put it. The line is not what took his land off him. The line is his deed.

You already know this in your hands, even without a word for it, and Scripture had the word first. Psalm 16:6 says the lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places and thanks God for where the cord fell rather than for its absence, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept a survey term inside a song of gladness, which means a shape is not the opposite of a good morning. Think of a kitchen where every single thing lives in the same place every single time. You can cook in that kitchen half asleep and talking to somebody, because your hands know where the spoons are, and your mind is free for the conversation. Now think of a kitchen where nothing has a place. You will spend the whole hour looking for things, and you will call that freedom, and you will not have made anything.

Six weeks of open ground. Nine days of somebody else's rope.

You did not fail that planner, and the thing you have quietly carried since January is not a verdict on you. Psalm 16:5 says the Lord maintaineth my lot and puts the measuring in His hand rather than in a stranger’s, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which means a cord cut for another woman’s field was never going to lie down on your ground. That cord was cut for her field. It was measured for her land, her body, her hours, the people who do and do not live in her house. You pinned another woman's boundary over your own ground and it did not fit, and that is not a verdict on you. It is arithmetic.

There were people once who woke up to find the whole frame of their lives simply gone. The thing they had sworn to was not on the other end of the promise any more, and the money and the law that kept their doors open had gone with it. They did not choose between no shape at all and somebody else's shape imposed from a distance. They sat down together and drew a new line, and then, remarkably, they put the ordinary people in the seats inside the drawing of it, and gave them a voice in where it fell.

That is not history to be admired at a distance. It is a picture of what may be done on a Tuesday in August in an ordinary kitchen.

And let me be careful here, because this is exactly the point where somebody would love to hand you a system, and I am not going to. I am not going to name your shape. Not the hour, not the practice, not the order of it. A shape somebody else picks for you is somebody else's shape, and that is the precise thing that came out of the drawer nine days later.

Nor is there one word here against a life with very little structure in it, or against a life with a great deal. I have sat with people flourishing in both, and the ones who are flourishing are not flourishing because of where the dial is set.