The first few weeks of a new job test our abilities to take in information. For days we come home tired and then have calls in the evening. Some days we stay home and talk either to each other or others constantly. We read, worry, check, reach out and try so hard to learn faster.

The process feels like a test of our ability to learn. Here is all of the information, our new employers say. When can you make decisions? And for weeks, on long walks after dinner or while having coffee in the morning, we tell each other to make fewer decisions, to try and do as little as possible, to react as little as possible. Because we do not yet know, and will regret the decisions made in haste these first few weeks. Take it slow, we tell each other. Don’t believe that we understand the situation, we tell each other. Be patient and learn, we say. These are the words of our past selves. The strengths of repeated startup failures is a wealth of experience in starting over, in learning everything again.

Finally, now, driven by those past tries, we are relaxed enough to tell our colleagues and our managers that we are trying to avoid making decision early. We are trying to avoid making decisions rashly, without all the data. And one week in it’s not possible to have all the data, have all the knowledge of what came before. We test our capacity to input and find it wanting, unable to absorb thousands of hours of learning and creation in the scant hours of a single week. We talk about how tired our brains are, in the evenings before sleep.

We do not give credit enough to how awake our brains are. After months of ping pong and yoga, surfing and naps, video games and novels, we are awake. We are more fully deployed and our abilities tested in all directions. It is exhausting in the way that true utilization is exhausting. It is tiring in the way tournaments are tiring, our bodies pushed to and beyond what they were ready for. The evenings this past week have been like those glorious hours of post tournament revelry where we are beat up and utterly present.

So here we are again in the summer of twenty twenty: happy, exhausted, full of energy, unable to sleep, and fully alive.

Saturated.