Against Permanent Availability

There is a courtesy in being reachable. I do not want to argue against courtesy. When my neighbour's roof failed in February she called at eleven at night and I was glad the telephone worked. Availability is one of the ordinary mercies, and any argument that leaves out the roof is not worth making.

But availability has changed character. It used to be a decision — one made in advance, for particular people, under particular conditions. Now it is a default condition of the body. We are reachable in the way that a field is rained on.

Modern life rewards fragmentation more often than coherence. It does not do this cruelly. It does it by making every interruption slightly easier than the work it interrupts.

The practical harm is not that we are disturbed. It is that we begin to arrange our inner lives around the expectation of disturbance. We stop starting things that cannot be abandoned within four minutes. Over a decade, this quietly removes an entire category of work from a life: the long repair, the difficult letter, the hour spent sitting with someone who is not going to improve.

At the North House we keep the morning closed^[1]. No correspondence is read before noon; nothing is answered until the afternoon. This is not a moral position and we do not present it as one to visitors. It is a scheduling arrangement, and it works for the same reason any scheduling arrangement works, which is that someone finally decided.

What surprises new members is how little is lost. In eleven years I can recall two matters^[2] that genuinely could not wait until one o'clock. Everything else was simply arriving at the speed things now arrive at, which we have mistaken for the speed at which they matter.

I would put it this way. Permanent availability offers you the feeling of being needed while removing your capacity to be useful. It is a poor trade, made hourly, by people who would never accept it if it were offered once in writing.

A member wrote to me last year to say that she had begun keeping the morning closed at home, alone, with no house around her and no steward to notice. She said the first week was unpleasant and the second was not. She asked whether this counted as practice if nobody observed it.

No decision is wholly private once it enters the continuity of a shared life.

I told her it counted. I did not tell her, because it would have been unkind and because she will learn it in her own time, that the question she asked is the more interesting one.