Rehearsing In The Shower

Seven in the morning, and the case opens.

She does not choose it. It is running before the water is warm, and by the time she has the shampoo in her hand she is four exchanges deep into a conversation that finished on the eleventh of last month.

She has improved it considerably since it actually happened. In the real version she said something adequate. In this version she says the thing that lands, and there is a small pause on the other side that she can feel in her chest, and then she says the second thing, which is better than the first.

Sometimes she wins so completely that she has to start again, because there is nothing left to say and the shower is not finished.

She arrives at work at eight forty having already been in court for ninety minutes, and nobody there knows anything about it, including the person she has been prosecuting, who is perfectly friendly at the coffee machine and has no idea.

She is tired by eleven. She always is. She puts it down to sleep.

If you have your own court that convenes before anybody is awake, you know exactly what I mean. And I am not going to tell you what it means about you. I am going to tell you what it costs.

Whose court is it

Here is what I want to describe, and you can decide for yourself how much of it is yours.

A rehearsal is work. It looks like nothing because it happens in the shower, but it takes real energy: you are holding both sides of a conversation, running the other person's likely responses, adjusting, going again. That is the same machinery you would use to solve an actual problem, and it is running at full load on a thing that is finished.

You get out of the shower with the day's first hour already spent, and you spend it every morning, and nobody bills you for it so you never see the total.

Now read what Paul says about the whole business, and read it as relief rather than as a telling off.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

Notice who is missing from that verse. You are. Not as a defendant, which is what you would expect. As the judge. Paul is saying that the bench in this matter is occupied, and it is not you sitting in it, and that is not a demotion. It is a discharge.

You are relieved of a case that was never assigned to you, and the relieving is already done rather than something to work toward. That is not a rebuke of you. It is written in Romans 14:4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

And look at the last clause, because it is the one nobody quotes. He shall be held up, for God is able to make him stand. Even the outcome you are worried about has been taken care of by somebody else.

So the seven in the morning session has not been diligence. You have a Judge who has already taken the matter, and there is nothing in that shower left for you to settle. The word settled that long before the eleventh of last month, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

What the rehearsal is actually for

Here is the part worth naming gently, because you have probably never said it to yourself in words.

The rehearsal is not about the other person. It is about the gap between what you said and what you wanted to have said, and it will keep running until that gap closes, and the gap cannot close, because the conversation is over.

So the loop has no exit. It is not solving anything and it was never going to. It is a system that runs until something interrupts it, and the only thing that has ever interrupted it is being late.

And here is the cost, which is exact. The person you are prosecuting is fine. They are at the coffee machine. Whatever they did or did not do on the eleventh, they have not spent one minute on it since, and you have spent perhaps forty hours.

You have permission to stop presenting a case nobody is hearing, and the permission was given rather than earned by finally winning it. Romans 14 says he stands or falls to his own master; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to get out of a shower with the day unspent.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the reason you cannot stop rehearsing is that somebody near you makes you pay for every mistake, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.