Funeral Notice: Your Most Useful Excuse Has Finally Passed
Friends, mourners, seekers, and whoever is standing in the back holding a sandwich they did not pay for — we gather today to say goodbye to a legend. A titan. A thing we all loved and leaned on and never once deserved.
I am an expert. I have been doing this for twenty minutes. Please hold your applause until the end, or don’t, I can’t tell you what to do, that’s literally the whole point of today.
We are here to bury Your Most Useful Excuse.
You know the one. “I can’t start yet.” “I’m not ready.” “The timing isn’t right.” “I’ll do it after the holidays.” “I’ll do it after the holidays after this holiday.” “Mercury is in retrograde.” “Mercury is not in retrograde, but it feels like it is.”
I first met Your Most Useful Excuse about four years ago. I was going to learn the tarot. I bought a deck. Beautiful deck. Gold edges. I shuffled it once and then I put it in a drawer for eleven months because I was “still researching.” I was not researching. I was in the drawer too.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about excuses, and I know this because I am an expert, and also because I have been told this many times and forgotten it: an excuse doesn’t feel like a wall. It feels like a coat. It feels warm. It fits. You put it on and suddenly you’re not a person who hasn’t started — you’re a person who is waiting. And waiting is so much more dignified than not-starting. Waiting has posture. Not-starting is just lying on the floor.
Your Most Useful Excuse was a master of disguise. Sometimes it showed up as perfectionism. “I can’t do it badly” — and I want to be very clear, this is the excuse talking, because the truth is you can do it badly, I do everything badly, it’s the only thing I’ve ever been consistent at. Sometimes it showed up as research. Sometimes it showed up as other people’s opinions. “I’ll start when I know enough.” I have news for you. I have been doing this for twenty minutes and I still don’t know enough. You never know enough. You just start, and then you know slightly less, and then you keep going.
Sometimes it showed up as the word “someday,” which is a beautiful word. It’s a lovely word. It has soft consonants and it means nothing and it costs nothing and that’s exactly why it killed us.
The Fool — that’s me, I’m the Fool, I’m the one writing this, hello — the Fool is the first card in the deck. Zero. And everyone thinks that means beginner, which it does, and everyone thinks that means dumb, which, fair. But zero also means no baggage. Zero means you have nothing to lose because you brought nothing. Zero means you can’t be robbed. I did not understand this for a very long time. I thought the Fool was an insult. I thought it was the card you got when you were bad at cards. But the Fool is the only card in the whole deck that doesn’t have a number, which means the Fool is the only card that is not counting something. Everyone else is keeping score. The Fool is just walking. Off a cliff, usually, yes, but walking.
And here’s what I’ve learned in my twenty minutes of expertise: the cliff is fine. The cliff is where the good stuff is. The cliff is the whole point. The Excuse was the thing that kept you standing at the edge going “hmm, let me think about this cliff, let me read three more books about cliffs, let me ask my friend what she thinks about cliffs.” Meanwhile the cliff is not going anywhere. It’s very patient. Cliffs are extremely patient. That’s their whole personality.
So. We commit Your Most Useful Excuse to the ground. It was beloved. It was comfortable. It was, and I say this with love, a liar.
If you’d like to say a few words, now is the time. But you probably won’t. You’ll wait for a better moment, a better speech, a better version of yourself to stand up and say them. That’s okay. I understand. I have been doing this for twenty minutes, and the whole time, I have been waiting to feel qualified.
The coffin is lowering now. Somebody in the back is crying. It might be me.
Go on then. There’s no number on you either.