If the Soul Cannot Breathe

I finished the day with tired eyes — the particular fatigue that comes not from moving through the world but from staring at a screen for too many hours, the kind that makes even the page of a beloved book feel like one more demand. Tomorrow is Friday, and I am grateful for that small mercy. But tonight, even as my eyes protest, I know I need this. I need the quiet, the book, the sentence that arrives like a hand extended across time.

I finished May Sarton’s journal At Seventy a few months ago, reluctantly, the way one closes a book one has been deliberately reading slowly to make it last. But tonight, scrolling back through my journal, I found a passage I had copied from it — and the timing felt like anything but coincidence. The right sentence has a way of waiting for you, patient and unhurried, until you are ready to actually hear it. She is talking to a friend who is frustrated with her job, worn down by it, and she says:

"It is bad to come home at the end of the day too tired to save a few hours for oneself, too tired to be nourished by music or reading or friends... If there is not enough space in a life or within a job for the soul to breathe, then there is something wrong."

I read it twice. Then I sat with it.

She wrote this long before anyone in the corporate world began scheduling "wellness sessions" and printing soul in the mission statements of technology companies. She wrote it simply, as she wrote everything — as an act of attention to what is actually true about human beings, which is that we cannot give indefinitely from an empty vessel, that the mind which is never allowed to rest is not resting but slowly going somewhere the body cannot follow.

I recognize myself in her friend. I recognize this week. The early mornings, the back-to-back calls, the evenings when the work does not so much end as pause, waiting for me to look at my phone again. I love what I do — I want to be honest about that, I am not complaining in any simple way — but love for one's work does not protect the soul from the particular exhaustion of too much screen, too little silence, too few hours in which one is simply a person rather than a function.

What I want, and what I do not always manage to give myself, is the balance May understood so instinctively: that the reading, the music, the long conversation, the walk in the evening, the poem before sleep — these are not rewards for the work. They are the condition of the work. They are what makes the rest of it possible, what keeps the interior life from going thin and gray and mechanical. Without them, one is merely efficient. With them, one is occasionally, briefly, alive in the fullest sense.

Tonight my eyes are tired and the page swims a little. But I am here, reading, which is its own form of insistence — the soul quietly asserting its requirements even at the end of a long Thursday, even when the body would prefer to simply stop. May would approve, I think. She always did understand the ones who kept trying even when they were tired.