Since I was a boy, a feeling followed me. The first time I tried to name it I was eight. I told my mother I had felt like crying for a week. She asked why, and I gave her the truest answer I have ever given anyone: I have no idea. Nothing had happened. Nothing was missing.

For most of my life I believed that meant something was wrong with me. It took me the rest of it to understand that nothing was. The feeling is not a wound, and not a lack — it is the world arriving without the padding, the texture of being alive when nothing is covering it. It is how openness feels. And if it has ever found you — on the drive home after a good evening, in the kitchen at half past nine, in the long empty Sunday afternoon — then I wrote this for you as much as for me.

Softsadness is my name for it, and this is the book everything else I have made was walking toward — the fatherhood, the fear, the gap between what happens and what we make of it, all of it one question asked from different rooms. It comes to rest here.

I won't promise you a breakthrough. There is no reward in these pages and no arrival — only a name, one small practice, and the end of a lifelong misreading, in the company of an emperor, a kitchen monk, a friar in the dark, a mystic who would not sign his name, and the man on the cover, who asked for the night to pass, and stayed. It is quieter than the books that promise to fix you. I believe it is truer.

It is the last book I will write, and I am at peace with that. I offer it the way a friend offers — with nothing held back, and nothing asked in return. I wrote it so that you would not need me after it.

— a friend

Read by Joel Baker (singer/songwriter)