From a window in the heart of Lugano, looking out over the Maghetti quarter, at this hour you can see two buildings and a piece of sky. The first is an early twentieth-century house, with white cornices under the eaves and tall windows. The second, lower, has a roof of clay tiles and wooden shutters. Behind them, the sky changes colour so quickly that it cannot be named: it was pink, it is violet, soon it will simply be dark.
At the top of the taller building, in the attic, a yellow light has just come on. Beside it, a thread of white smoke rises from the chimney and the wind bends it to the left. It is one of the first fires of the season. Someone up there has decided that tonight is cold enough, and with that gesture has closed the summer without telling anyone.
Below, the windows light up one at a time. The shutters of the lower building are still open, but the glass is already dark. Nothing happens in this scene. And yet October always begins like this: not with a date on the calendar, but with houses that, one after another, gather themselves in.
They close, to find themselves again.
Dark at five
In Lugano today the sun sets just before a quarter to seven. In less than two weeks, on the last Sunday of October, the clocks go back and sunset will drop suddenly to around twenty past five. In December the sun will be gone soon after half past four, and the shortest days of the year will have less than nine hours of light. People will leave the office in the dark, with the feeling that evening begins in the middle of the afternoon.
We usually tell this as a loss. We complain about the dark, wait for spring, count the weeks. Winter becomes a season to get through with our heads down, a parenthesis between two summers.
It was not always so. The American historian Roger Ekirch spent years searching diaries, court records and literature for traces of the night, from the Odyssey onwards, and in his book At Day’s Close he showed that until the nineteenth century people in Europe often slept in two parts. They went to bed a few hours after dusk, slept a first sleep, then woke for about an hour after midnight before a second sleep that lasted until dawn. In that hour of darkness there was no work to be done. People thought, prayed, talked quietly with whoever slept beside them. Then came gas and electricity, the evenings grew longer, and that hour disappeared.
In the 1990s the psychiatrist Thomas Wehr tried to give it back. He kept a group of volunteers in darkness for fourteen hours a day, for a month. By the fourth week they were sleeping in two parts again, with one or two hours of quiet wakefulness in between. Darkness, in other words, did not only take the day away from us. It gave us back a time that belonged to no one else.
For centuries, after all, darkness was the natural boundary of work. The farmer came home with the last light, shut the stable, hung up his tools, and the work stayed outside, in the fields, until dawn. No one asked him to decide when to stop: the sky decided for him. Then came electric light, and after it the phone in our pocket, and that boundary vanished. Today, dark at five closes nothing. We have to do it ourselves.
Perhaps the real question, then, is not how to resist the dark, but what it asks of us. And the answer this window seems to give, with its lights coming on one at a time, is the oldest of all: to go back inside. To close something out in order to find something within.
We close to find again.
Closing well
Anyone who owns a rustico, one of the old stone houses in the Ticino valleys, knows the last morning of the season. You turn off the water and open all the taps, so the pipes empty before the frost. You clear the ashes from the fireplace, bring the pots inside, stack the wood under the lean-to. Then you close the shutters, one after another, and the house goes dark while outside it is still day.
None of these gestures serves the person who is leaving. They all serve the person who will come back: in May the wood will be dry, the pipes whole, the house ready. Closing well means writing a note to the person we will be in six months, and leaving it on the table.
There is another effect, less visible. Whoever has closed the house well no longer thinks about it on the way down to the valley. He does not wake at night wondering whether he turned off the water. The house stays up there, in the cold, and he is free to be elsewhere. Caring for what comes after does not only protect the house. It protects the mind of the one who left it.
The doors left open
In Berlin in the 1920s, the psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed that the waiter at his café could effortlessly remember the orders of every table still to pay, and forgot them as soon as the bill was settled. One of his students, Bluma Zeigarnik, turned the observation into an experiment: in 1927 she showed that interrupted tasks are remembered far better than finished ones. What remains open keeps calling to us. What is settled lets us go.
Almost a century later, in 2011, the American psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that silencing that call does not require finishing. In their experiments, people with an important task still pending kept thinking about it while doing something else, and performed worse at everything else. But it was enough to decide when, where and how they would pick it up again for the mind to leave it in peace.
This is what the person closing the house does. Nothing is finished: the house will be reopened, the wood burned, the pipes filled. But he has decided how and when it will all begin again. And the mind, at last, lets go.
We do not close to finish. We close to find again.
Letting go to find again
We all know the moment. A name that will not come for a whole hour, then returns by itself while we are washing the dishes. A sentence for a difficult letter that cannot be found at the desk and arrives on the lakefront, while walking without thinking. A work problem that seemed hopeless in the evening and, the next morning over coffee, looks almost obvious. We did not solve it by insisting. We solved it by stopping.
It is not just an impression. Those who study creative thinking call it incubation, and in 2009 a large review by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod, pooling more than a hundred studies, confirmed it: setting a problem aside really does help to solve it. But on two conditions, which say a great deal about how we live. The first is to have worked on it seriously before letting it go. The second is to let it go for real: if the pause is filled with another task that demands the whole mind, the effect fades. The mind only finds again what we have allowed it to set down.
This is where closing and letting go meet. Whoever closes a day badly lets go of nothing: he carries it all to dinner, to bed, into the next morning, and gives no idea the time to come back on its own. Whoever closes it well sets things down where he can find them again. Like the wood under the lean-to, which will be dry in May precisely because no one has touched it for six months.
There is also a simpler, almost trivial reason. Whoever stays at the computer late into the night, convinced he is gaining time, works with a mind that is less and less clear. In 2000 the Australian researchers Ann Williamson and Anne-Marie Feyer found that after seventeen to nineteen hours awake, around eleven at night for someone who got up at six, performance falls to the level of a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 percent: the limit beyond which, in Switzerland, you may no longer drive. Hours stolen from the night are hours of worse work. And the solution we chase while exhausted, one step from falling asleep on the keyboard, often arrives the next morning in ten minutes, with the coffee still hot.
Whoever closes the evening does not lose the night. He gains it twice: he rests, and the next day he is sharper than he would have been by staying awake.
We close to find again.
Closing the day
Work today has a problem farmers never had: it has no stable to shut. The office is in the phone, the phone is in the pocket, and the pocket comes with us everywhere. We answer an email at the table, between courses. At the restaurant, with friends, we turn the screen face down but still feel it buzz. In bed, the last thing we look at is the inbox, and at three in the morning we wake up thinking about the morning’s meeting. Work no longer ends: it follows us into our sleep.
A day like this does not close; it is interrupted. And an interrupted day, like the unpaid tables of the Berlin waiter, keeps calling us even when we are somewhere else.
The German psychologist Sabine Sonnentag has spent twenty years studying what she calls psychological detachment: the ability to stop thinking about work once work is over. Her research describes a circle that anyone who works hard knows well. The heavier the workload, the harder it is to detach; and the less we detach, the more fatigue, exhaustion and dissatisfaction grow. Those who most need to close are the ones least able to.
In this journal we call Calm Performance a way of working that measures performance not only by what it produces, but also by what it manages to preserve: energy, attention, clarity. Seen from here, the end of the day is not an organisational detail. It is the moment when we decide whether tomorrow will begin with a clear mind or with ten windows still open.
This holds for days, but also for the longer seasons of life: a job that ends, a project that concludes, a phase left behind. There is a time to plant and a time to uproot, says Ecclesiastes. The seasons that close are not the opposite of those that open. They are what makes them possible.
We close to find again.
Smoke from the chimney
Outside the window, meanwhile, the sky above the Maghetti is no longer violet. The lower building is almost entirely dark; a single window stays lit, bottom left. At the top of the other building the attic still glows, and smoke still rises from the chimney, thinner than before.
There is no knowing who is up there. Perhaps someone who has finished work and decided, tonight, not to open the computer again. Perhaps someone who has just put a log on the fire and sat down to watch it, with an unsolved problem that tomorrow morning may seem simple. It does not matter. That thread of smoke says only that someone in there has closed what needed closing, and can now simply be.
In less than two weeks, at six in the evening, it will already be dark. The houses of Lugano will close a little earlier, and a little more. They will not stop living. They will only stop asking. And in that silence, as always, something we had let go will come back to be found.
We close to find again.
