There is an old saying that if you fall off a horse, there is only one thing to do, get back up in the saddle and get going again.
I stopped writing on Substack at the end of last summer. Time to start again.
I had a good run of writing on Substack through the summer months. A trip to France in June provided inspiration from the Matisse Chapel, the Fernand Léger Museum and other great small museums in Provence, and some great restaurants. But on returning home to Connecticut, the habit of writing slipped away for what, in retrospect, were three reasons.
First, I set an overly ambitious goal of writing a piece about why the museums located around the Connecticut River Valley constitute one of the world’s great art regions. I became too bogged down in it and the essay was too much of a “listicle” rather than something with insight. I abandoned that essay and lost the rhythm of publishing weekly. Inertia took over and I never got back to it.
Second, I had a full schedule in the autumn and winter that included business commitments, a trip to Lana’i, and a few days of golf on a fantastic course. I could say to myself that I did not have the time to write, but that would be an oversimplification.
If it weren’t for the difficulty in overcoming inertia once I stopped, I could have started writing again with just a break of a week or two. But, in my experience, it is much easier to find the time to do something, no matter how complicated the schedule, than it is to break the bonds of inertia. According to the laws of physics, a body in motion stays in motion, and a body at rest stays at rest.
The third reason is more personal and psychological. I had made the decision to participate in the Write of Passage online writing cohort scheduled for last autumn. In the past, I have found Write of Passage to be energizing, thought-provoking and a spur to publishing a weekly essay, at least for the five-week period of the course. This time around, full participation was going to be difficult because of competing time commitments, but I thought that I would at least be able to review the videos of the live sessions and post the essays.
In the early days of the cohort, before the live sessions began, I read an essay posted by a participant that took an anti-Catholic point of view. The anti-Catholicism wasn’t just incidental to the essay, it was the point of the essay. I did not engage in commentary. Instead, I just backed away from Write of Passage. My bad. It wasn’t even what I would consider a rational decision.
There is, of course, established wisdom on how to deal with these situations, which I did not summon at the time.
Epictetus writes about going to the Roman bath and being subjected to stealing, splashing and generally offensive behavior:
“You will more steadily engage in the activity if you frankly say, ‘I want to bathe and want to hold my will in accordance with nature’. And do the same for every activity. So, if any impediment arises in bathing, readily say ‘I did not only want this, but I also wanted to hold my will in accordance with nature; and I will not hold it like that if I am annoyed about what happens.”
In other words, hold to your own course, even if you are exposed to behavior that you find objectionable.
Marcus Aurelius provides much the same advice in the first paragraph of Book II of Meditations:
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.”
And then there is the inscription on my favorite pillow:
I am now back to both Substack and to Write of Passage.
In the next few weeks, I intend to post pieces on:
What did F. Scott Fitzgerald mean by horsemanship?
The need for deeper reading on corporate boards and.
Where have all the jokes gone?
I hope that you will look for them.
Thank you for reading,
Drake
...welcome back to the words...
It is good to read you again. I look forward to what comes next. My best to you Drake. I do hope one day I can see these museums on the Connecticut.