The Deferred Life

I was cleaning my office last week and found an old notebook.

A friend gave it to me years ago. The cover was personalized with the title, “Ceaneh’s Next Big Idea.” I had completely forgotten I had it, so I sat down right there on the floor and started flipping through.

It was all in there. An adjustable desk with ornate legs. A vending machine for custom beauty products. A social network for sports travel teams. Ten years of things I was sure. By the third page, I was laughing at myself.

Then I turned to one page and stopped.

A talent marketplace for interns and apprentices. The right people connected to the right work. I was in a tech incubator when I wrote it down. I built it to MVP. Then COVID hit and the idea died in the shuffle.

The name at the top of the page was Catapaultt.

The company I run now. The thing I jumped off the cliff to build without a parachute. There it was, in my own handwriting, ten years old, waiting for me to come back.

At first, I thought I was just amused by my old ideas. There is something funny about meeting old versions of yourself on paper. The version who thought an ornate adjustable desk might be the next big thing. The version who had a whole beauty vending machine concept. The version who could get wildly clear about an idea and then move on to the next page.

But this page felt different. This one felt like it had been waiting for me.

I have spent a lot of my life chasing what comes next.

Sometimes the chase served me well. It got me through hard seasons. It helped me build a career. It taught me how to move when the path was unclear and keep going when nobody was coming to hand me permission.

But chasing can get tricky when you do it for too long.

At some point, forward motion can start to feel like the only proof that you are becoming who you are supposed to be. You keep reaching for the next title, the next number, the next version of your life where everything will finally feel settled. You tell yourself you will relax when you get there, but when you get there, your mind is already building the next finish line.

I know this because I do it.

I found Catapaultt in that notebook and even with the proof sitting in front of me, even with my own handwriting staring back at me, a part of me still wanted to flip to the next page and ask what else was there.

There is a name for this. The arrival fallacy, a cognitive illusion of future satisfaction.

It is the belief that reaching the thing will finally give you the feeling you thought would come with it. The job will make you feel secure. The number will make you feel successful. The move will make you feel free. The next level will finally make you feel like you can exhale.

Sometimes it does, for a little while.

Then life becomes life again.

The dream becomes a calendar. The business becomes emails and invoices and decisions. The house becomes maintenance. The child you prayed for becomes a young adult walking into their own life. The opportunity you wanted becomes responsibility. The thing you once imagined becomes ordinary because now you are inside it.

That doesn’t make it less meaningful. It just makes it easier to miss.

I think that is what happens to a lot of us. We are not ungrateful. We are not blind to the good that surrounds us. We are just moving so fast toward the next thing that we forget to feel the thing we are already standing in.

That notebook reminded me that some dreams do not arrive all at once. Sometimes they come back around after you have lived enough life to carry them differently.

Catapaultt does not look exactly the way I imagined it ten years ago. It did not arrive on the timeline I had in mind. It went quiet for a while. I built other things. I became other versions of myself. Then one day, the thread came back, and this time I was ready enough to follow it.

That is what I don’t want to miss.

I don’t want to be so busy proving the next thing that I forget to enjoy the dream I’m living now. I don’t want to spend my whole life standing inside answered prayers with my eyes fixed on the next request.

So I am trying to practice naming what is here before I rush past it.

The business card with my own company on it. The clients who trust me. The home office I was cleaning when I found the notebook. The freedom I used to talk about wanting. The life that does not always feel dramatic because it is mine now, but would have meant everything to a former version of me.

Maybe you have something like that too.

Something you once wanted badly that now feels normal because you live with it every day. A job, a city, a relationship, a child, a home, a room you get to sit in, a level of peace you had to fight for, a version of yourself you kept trying to become.

It is easy to miss the arrival when it does not look like arrival. Some days it looks like your regular Tuesday. Other days it looks like responsibility. Or work. Or a notebook you find on the floor of your office with your own future written across the page.

I am still going to build. I am still going to dream. I am still going to flip to the next page because that is part of who I am.

But I want to pause before I turn it.

I want to look around long enough to say, this was the dream too.

The life you are living right now was somebody’s wildest dream once.

She was you.

Until next Tuesday,
Ceaneh