Plumb and level

I told myself I’d stop reading the news in bed. …I have not.

Most nights the phone still ends up in my hand, the room dark, the screen too bright. And the headlines stack up the way they do now. A war that is but then isn’t, and may or may not be ending, depending which hour you check. Petrol up again. Rates up again. Then holding. Somewhere, another job quietly handed to a piece of software.

It washes over you. Not as one big thing. As a hundred small ones, layered, until you’re not really reading anymore. Just… absorbing. This conjecture that never ends on what will happen next, and whether it will be good or bad. Often biased, always sensationalised for the click, and never really deserving of the bandwidth you’ve got leftover at the end of the day.

Then you put the phone down and lie there. Heart going a little faster than it should.

Here’s the thing I keep landing on, though.

None of it is mine to fix.

I can read every update on the Strait of Hormuz from now until morning, and the Strait of Hormuz will not notice. I can refresh the markets, run the numbers on the next rate decision, doom-scroll the layoffs. And not one cent of it moves because I lost sleep over it.

The weight of this stuff is certainly real. Mortgages, rent, bills that don’t flinch when the news gets worse. The last thing I want to do is tie a bow on it. Some of this is just hard, and saying so plainly is more honest than pretending otherwise.

But there’s a difference between caring about something and carrying it. And lately I’ve found myself falling into a pattern of carrying things that were never mine to lift.

Before any of this, I was a plasterer. Before River. Before I, or any of us, had to form and wrestle with opinions about AI.

So I think with my hands more than I’d like to admit. And plastering teaches you something about what you can and can’t control.

You can’t control the weather, and the weather decides how your plaster sets. You can’t control the heat, the humidity, the delivery that turns up late, the client who changes their mind on a Friday. Half the job is conditions you didn’t choose and can’t budge.

But you can control the mix. The prep. Whether the surface underneath is true.

And you’ve got one tool that doesn’t care at all about the noise:

The spirit level.

I can’t help but take the piss out of myself a little even as I write this. Compared to the mess of concepts we’re all asked to deal with today, it’s one of the most uninteresting things you could turn your attention to.

It’s just a bit of alloy with a little window in it, a bubble of air sitting in green liquid.

You lay it against the work. If the bubble drifts to one end, you’re off. So you adjust. You bring it back to the middle. When it sits dead centre, you’re true. Plumb one way. Level the other.

You don’t get a wall straight by staring at the whole house. You don’t even get it straight by staring at the whole wall. You watch the bubble. This section. This stretch. The metre in front of you.

Get that true. Then move along. Then the next.

These days there are fancy digital versions that are astoundingly accurate and almost always better than the real thing. But I’ve got muscle memory the old fashioned way, and I’ve never found that green liquid or bubble whinge that it needs charging.

It’d also break my point, which is that I’ve been trying to live a bit more like that lately.

Not because I’ve cracked it. The bubble drifts on me constantly. I still pick the phone back up, still feel the pull of all the things I can’t touch. I’m not often writing from the far side of anything, and that’s all true here.

This is more me telling you what I’m reaching for, on the days I remember to reach for it.

The metre in front of me is real. And it’s mine.

The people in my house. The call I said I’d return. The work I can actually do well today, instead of the imaginary work of fixing a world that didn’t ask me to. The walk I keep putting off. The night I cook instead of scroll. The mate I check on. Because checking on each other is one of the few things still inside our hands.

None of that fixes the news. There isn’t a fix. But it’s the difference between being steady and being swept.

And steady isn’t the same as calm. I want to be clear about that. Because the chirpy version of this makes me cringe. The one that tells you to count your blessings and go for a walk. And I suspect it makes you cringe too.

I think we’re allowed to find this hard. And be tired. Most of us are running closer to the last reserve than we’d let on. It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like it’s weakness, until you realise that it’s all of us. I think this is just what it costs to be a person in a heavy stretch.

So steady isn’t a solve. It only means you’ve stopped trying to level the horizon. You’ve gone back to the bubble. To the bit of wall you can actually reach.

So if it’s all feeling like a lot right now, whether it’s the world, the money, the machines, the exhaustion none of us seem able to put down? Same, I guess.

And with a career that has me sitting in a lot of lounge rooms, seeing a lot of lives outside my own circles, I can assure you that it’s not just you, and it’s not just me.

You’re not failing. You’re not behind. You’re probably just standing too far back, trying to straighten a whole house at once.

Put the phone down. Find the metre in front of you. Watch the bubble. Bring it back to the middle.

And then, gently, do the next bit. I’m writing that for me as much as for you.