I’m listening to mini-podcasts by Michelle Buteau, my favourite stand-up comedian. She makes me laugh sooo hard, and I often think about how lovely it would be to have a friend like her. Someone who’s bold and unfiltered, and knows how to laugh at life without being careless with it. Someone with freckles, too. Yes, even that part.

Michelle Buteau aside, there’s a man I see near my house almost every day. He’s elderly, maybe in his late seventies or early eighties, with grey hair and a walking stick. I don’t know his name, or who he goes home to, but I know he walks daily. Without fail. Always at 4:30 p.m.

I imagine he has a timetable. Or maybe just a deep understanding of rhythm, of structure, and how it protects you when life doesn’t. I wonder if he was in the military once, or if discipline just found him early. I want to talk to him one of these days, cos he looks like someone who carries stories and lives in his bones. I’d like to sit with him, walk with him, maybe, and ask him about the world he’s watched change, and what’s kept him steady through it.

I don’t always feel steady. Most of the time I do things when I feel like doing them. If I don’t feel like writing, I don’t write. If I feel like resting, I rest, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I think. But lately, life has been showing me that there’s a place for discipline. A place for consistency that doesn’t depend on how you feel. You can’t just sleep all day because you want to. You can’t avoid the hard things because they’re hard. You can’t keep saying ‘tomorrow’, expecting life to wait for you.

May the gods of discipline attack.

Maybe that’s what adulting is: being willing to structure your life not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s necessary. Maybe the point is to build small rhythms that keep you anchored – that steadiness isn’t a feeling, but a practice. I think that’s what adulthood is teaching me right now.

What lesson is adulthood teaching you in this season? Let me know.

Yours, curiously,

Njoks.