A New Morning
Reflections upon awakening
Discipline - a vehicle to joy, I’m told - and this is a part of it. Rising early and getting into writing for you, my subscribers, and anyone within reach of this Substack; in doing this, I’m hopeful that something I write will resonate.
Long Reads sent me their weekly Top 5 wherein I found this quotation:
“The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?”
Does anyone remember that this week started out with an extra hour as daylight saving time kicked off in North America? The nights might be long and dark for the foreseeable future, but we've got some great reading to help you get through.
In Cameron Carr's thoughtful essay "Finding Worth Among the Echoes," he ponders where meaning lies, somewhere between the blurring lines of work and play. As we reflect on the week that was and look toward the future, we wanted to reprise his thinking on the importance of creativity and community.
Our Top 5 rounds out this week's newsletter with stories about the New York City Marathon, an interview with Richard Gadd of Baby Reindeer fame, some revolutionary—and inspiring!—cyclists in Afghanistan, and more.
At the same time, Killing Time in the Crystal City was playing on my Sonos.
Living in Crystal City when I first moved up here to take a job supporting the Missile Defense Agency - a position I held from October 20, 2003 through April or May of 2004 - I had an apartment on the 8th floor of the Waterpark towers. There’s a lot of truth in Killing Time in the Crystal City. “Life just goes on that way.”
It’s a time for introspection - for gathering ourselves together and committing to creative work and supporting each other as we do it. So, this is to say that I hope more of you will find value here in “Harrowiings” and consider becoming paid subscribers.
Meanwhile, I’m reflecting on the coming journey south to visit my widowed mother in Charter Senior Living where my sister has placed her. My sister is the executor of my late father’s estate and is the Trustee of the Gill Family Trust. For my part, I’ve established “The Harold B Gill Foundation” and continue working on transcribing articles published in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal which are not already available online. A number of articles are available online. There will also be an auction of the extensive postage stamp collection that he and I built together which will include a catalog memorializing him as a philatelist. I think he’d be proud of how well we are caring for his legacy.
I’m hoping that the process of openly writing about this experience of stewarding his legacy will move others to support it and thereby enable me to do more of it, but I cannot put all my eggs in that one basket. I need to care for the animal that I inhabit. To this end, I’m working with Lisa Joy Glassman on another project about which we’ll be sharing more in the near future. Her company, ActivePotential.com seeks to help performing artists maintain their most precious instrument, their bodies, by addressing physical challenges. By taking care of the physical, the mental health of the individual is also often aided just as much.
So it goes. I have much more to say about this in the future but for now, this will suffice. Feedback is most welcome and encouraged. May all of us get everything we need to keep on going regardless of what life throws at us.
If nothing else, please share this publication widely. Amplification is the most helpful thing anyone can do beyond becoming a paid subscriber.
