Choose One, Not Ten
What a misheard Tool lyric taught me about carrying too much
I wasn’t thinking about the song. It was just there, simmering underneath everything else in my mind. Is this what songs do when they’ve found something in you they’re not finished with?
It was Tool. The Grudge. And the line that kept surfacing was this:
Saturn ascends. Choose one, not ten. I’m born again.
My mind had apparently decided this one mattered.
The song does say “choose one or ten”. So I’d heard that part right. But somewhere between the song and the surface, my mind had changed the or to a not. And added the ending, “I’m born again.” A newly assembled three lines that don’t quite appear together in that order anywhere in the original.
What my unconscious had built was a complete thought. A small arc, you might say: cause, decision, consequence.
I didn’t notice until later. And when I did, I sat with it for a while. I’m starting to believe the subconscious mind doesn’t edit at random. It moves toward what it needs to say, hinting at where you need to change, or chart a new course.
The Other Kind of Tired
I’d been tired. Not from a lack of sleep. I know that feeling well, having recently come out of the newborn baby phase. I know how to fix that tiredness, even if you can’t always practically do it. This was the other kind. The kind Nic Peterson describes in Come Home as the kind where you sleep and still wake up tired. You’re well fed. You got a decent sleep. You haven’t been pushing too hard. But the most frustrating thing after all that: you’re exhausted, and you can’t explain it.
So you do what people do. You visit the doc, get blood tests, try supplements, and up the exercise routine. You start gravitating toward energy content through books, courses, and social media. You tell yourself it’s a management problem. But nothing really moves the needle.
Peterson’s diagnosis is blunt:
“You’re tired because you’re carrying an identity that isn’t yours, and the carrying takes work you don’t notice you’re doing.”
What if it’s not an energy problem? What if the energy problem is the symptom?
Identity, for most of us, isn’t something we consciously chose. It crept up on you. By the time you’re in your thirties or forties, you’re carrying ideas and beliefs about who you should be from parents, partners, teachers, and maybe a career you were only half interested in but never dared to say so. Some of it genuinely belongs to you. A lot of it arrived unconsciously.
Think about how you tailor your voice, depending on the situation: you pour the heartfelt truth out to your partner, but then there’s the version you give your parents, the front you put up at the party with people who seem to have it all figured out. Then there are the unlived identities quietly accumulating: the musician, the writer, the speaker. Each one a small weight. The sum of them is heavy. It’s hard work pretending to be someone you are not.
Half Here
David Whyte tells a story in Crossing the Unknown Sea about asking a Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, to tell him about exhaustion.
The antidote to exhaustion, Brother David said, is not rest. It’s wholeheartedness.
And then he said this directly to Whyte:
“You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don’t have to tell you.”
Half here. That phrase stuck with me. It names something more specific than burnout, and it feels more honest than the typical stress. It’s the cost of keeping too many versions of yourself in play, of never fully arriving anywhere. Whyte was so tired because most of what he was doing had nothing to do with his true powers. There is a cost.
You cannot be wholehearted across ten imagined versions of yourself. The energy that could go into the main thing you care about is instead spent keeping everything else standing.
The Clarification
I was scrolling the Substack Notes feed when this note from Emma Gannon landed:
“My goals have changed from ‘what do I want to achieve?’ (mindset in my 20s) to ‘how do I want to spend my life?’ (in my 30s & beyond).”
That’s not a softening of ambition. It’s a clarification of what’s actually being chosen. There is a real joy to be found once you stop treating your life as a project to be optimised and start treating it as something to be lived.
The big insight is:
You can move further in the direction you want from subtraction, not addition.
Which feels paradoxical, as we’re raised to believe more is better. But here, more is just mud.
Peterson’s prescription isn’t dramatic. The issue isn’t the one big decision. It’s the accumulation of all the small ways you keep pushing identities that no longer fit.
Give Away the Stone
Which brings me back to the song.
In context, the lyric “the one, the ten” is about clinging. About the suffering created by holding too tightly to certainty, to control, to a version of yourself you’ve decided is the only one. The whole song is one long argument for release. And the image it keeps returning to is simple:
Give away the stone. Don’t analyse it. Don’t solve it. Just stop carrying it.
My mind turned “choose one or ten” into choose one, not ten. The question became a decision. And then it added something the original never quite features: I’m born again.
I was quick to focus on the decision (one, not ten) because I could feel the weight of all that indecision. But later I felt that last part calling me. I’m born again. It’s not ancillary. It matters. Not in a religious or dramatic way. More as a sense of renewal. It’s what happens on the other side of the subtraction. When you stop hedging, when the energy that was going into maintenance comes back online for other things. There’s a lightness that arrives. I don’t mean instant enlightenment. It’s more of a satisfied quiet from carrying less.
The three lines my mind assembled turn out to be the whole argument:
Saturn ascends: life presenting the same lesson until something releases. Choose one, not ten: the decision, made from underneath the noise. I’m born again: not arrival. A renewal from unburdening.
I don’t think it matters whether you find this in a song, a book, a conversation at dinner with a wise friend, or a quiet moment where something just lands differently than it did before. What matters is whether you’re willing to take it seriously when it arrives.
Small. Repeated. In the direction you already know.
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