Checkmate in five moves
Photo by George Becker.
Last week we had childcare. It was fleeting, we only got a week of it. But for the first time in 112 days, we had five hours a day of uninterrupted work. We went to the office and everything - just the two of us.
Parenting during COVID is this relentless paradox of loving the time and struggling to endure it. And so the COVID-polite thing to do when you hear that parents have gotten their first taste of child care is to gush. Oh my god was it so amazing? Did you get giddy at being able to finish a coffee while it was still warm, or an article, or a thought?
Giddy doesn't really describe it. You know when you close your eyes, take a deep breath in and slowly breathe it out? And you feel your shoulders relax and your neck gets that warm tingle? It's much closer to relief than giddiness. And when you open your eyes again, sometimes you find you have some clarity you didn't have a minute ago.
40 percent
At lunch, we would walk around in our masks. Raw Signal HQ is in a retail-heavy, tourist-focused part of Toronto, and we weren't sure what to expect. In March, in the last days before lock down, it was a ghost town.
Now the businesses are all open. There are happy little distance circles all over the place, like a live-action Bil Keane comic. Every store has their doors wide open, despite the unending heat, so you'll know that they're open. Staff members stand out front, smiling behind their masks, to make sure you know they're open. They need you to know they're open.
We talk to business owners - in the retail district where our office is based and also in the broader tech community. And right now they're all using the same number. We're at about 40%. The ones that have been open throughout and the ones that just opened a few weeks ago. We're at about 40%. We'd be at 10% but we got creative with this and that and so now we're at 40% of what we were pre-COVID.
There aren't many businesses that can survive operating at 40% long term. The open doors and smiling staff belie a thing that was clear to us everywhere we went last week. Their rents are in arrears and it's even worse than it appears.
People talk about COVID as an accelerant. That if your business was struggling before all this, you’re likely in worse shape now. That’s true for business owners but it’s also true for everything else in your life. Jobs, roommates, friendships, marriages. Everything is under strain. All of it is somewhere along the COVID Richter scale. Where things are shaken, but we're not yet sure where they'll shake out.
40% is a hard number. Because it's large enough to give you some hope, but small enough that it can still feel hopeless. What really matters is the direction of it. Is it 40% on the way back to 80%, or a 40% bounce on the way back down to zero? Are these aspects of your life on the way from depletion back to fullness? Or are they a falling knife?
It's hard to know, from the outside looking in, the direction of someone else's 40%. It can be hard to know from the inside, too. But sometimes you really do have a strong gut sense.
Checkmate in five moves
Chess players do this. If you watch tournaments, there’s often a moment when one player will put their king down on the board and call it. They are out of moves. If you don’t play chess, it can seem like poor form to give up before the end. But they can see how the next five moves have to go. And once you’re out of moves, there’s no point in playing out the rest of the game. No amount of divine intervention that can change the pieces on the board. The losing player is eager to reset the pieces and start a new game.
We resist chess analogies most of the time because chess is a game where you have all the information, and life usually isn't. But sometimes it's exactly that clear. Sometimes you can see the board, and you know how it will end, and your only choice is what you do with that news.
Calling a mated board feels like failure because it is. You lost. The question in that moment isn’t “Would you like to fail?” It’s “Do you want to fail fast or slow? Can you acknowledge it yet, or do we have to play it all the way out?” Once it’s clear that there aren’t an unlimited number of moves on the board, there’s only two. Put it down. Or keep going.
We know the answer we’re supposed to choose. Hell, startup culture is all about the celebration of fast failure. But outside of startup bravado, in actual real life, we don't always do it. We routinely pick slow failure. We stay in the job because we have some unsubstantiated hope that it will get better. We convince ourselves we’re still learning. That there are moves on the board we’ve yet to explore. The decision is already made, but we’re moving through life like we’re still contemplating it.
So we come back to the question from earlier. Are you at 40% on your way back to 80? Or are you already clear that things are heading in the other direction?
And then what happens?
We don't want to be downers. Reality has enough of that right now. And if your 40% is rising, don't let us push you off that high. To be enduring 2020 and actually have a business, a relationship, a career, that is rising up is a hell of a thing. For you, all we can say is good work, and we hope you'll take time to celebrate.
For those of you who see yourself in the 40% and falling camp, though, it's time to see it for what it is. If it's genuinely changeable and you have the energy and the commitment to change it, we're rooting for you. If it's not changeable, though. Well.
More time is wasted in those last five moves, in that slow march from 40% down to zero. It's depressing to accept that a new move isn't going to appear. But it’s also so freeing to put down the shit that isn’t serving you anymore. To call it on the relationships that have been over for a long time. To flip over a board where you didn’t have any moves. And reset the pieces. So you can start again.
That doesn't mean quit today. There is zero shame offered or expected for staying in a safe-but-not-great situation until the storms of 2020 pass. But if you already know how this game ends, you can at least start setting up the pieces for the next one.
- Melissa and Johnathan