Onward!
Time marches on but it's always now.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Substack writers, we have an opportunity. We have been gifted with a remarkable platform which is continuing to evolve thanks to the Substack Team and their dedicated work. It is not just another social media platform. It’s a home for those who are helping to shape our society by doing more than just sharing pictures of their cats (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
As I go from dawn to dusk and back again, I’m creating a trail for anyone who wants to follow and I’m acutely aware that everything we do has impacts on the world that we are co-creating. I’m fond of reminding us that every cent spent is a vote for that world. We are not powerless. Some of us have more than others, it’s true. It seems to many of us that things are out of balance. At some level, we have allowed that to happen.
What of it? What’s to be done?
From my perspective, as limited and distorted as it necessarily is, we have to wake up. We have to be more conscious of how our activities impact on everything else. We are ancestors of all who come after us. Our own ancestors have built the world that we perceive. If there are problems, these can be identified and addressed using the tools that have been built. Substack is one of those tools.
I’ve been building a body of work using this platform. Harrowings, itself, is the publishing arm of the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC which was established initially to collect, protect, and preserve the work of my late father, but has expanded to include what remains of his father and, substantially, the work that I have been doing since emerging at 3:21 AM on February 4, 1963. I am a part of the creative work of my ancestors. Having no biological progeny, I feel it even more important to pour out what I have gathered from the past so that the future will have it available.
Is this an exercise in narcissism? I would hope not. I know that I am just another bozo on the bus. We are all temporary; brief flashes on the surface of eternity. We forget this, I believe, all too often. We are shocked when people die unexpectedly. Collectively, awareness of mortality sends into a spin and this awareness drives much of our behavior. I know it drives mine.
Along the way from dawn to dusk and back again, some spins of this “sweet, swinging sphere” ago, a good friend of mine, now departed, put The Denial of Death into my hands. This has led me to the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology just now; another rabbit hole into which to descend!
In general, we are all cast into this world in a state of utter helplessness, regardless of how we arrive and into whose hands we are entrusted. I marvel at the fact that each of us is individuated out of that from which we emerged and back into which we will inevitably return and what a short time we are present. I also marvel at how little we take into our awareness of the richness of being. This brings me to The Conquest of Abundance by Paul Feyerabend. I really can’t get enough of him.
The world continues and I need to get out and be a part of it. We’re all in this together after all:
Musing on Substack and Its Contents
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud is my springboard for this article.
As I led off this essay with a comment about Civilization and Its Discontents, I’d be remiss if I didn’t pull up a bit about it:
(Sigmund Freud) notes there exist different pathological and healthy states (e.g. love) where the boundary between ego and object is lost, blurred, or distorted. Freud categorizes the oceanic feeling as being a regression into an earlier state of consciousness—before the ego had differentiated itself from the world of objects. The need for this religious feeling, he writes, arises out of “the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father,” as there is no greater infantile need than a father’s protection.[6] Freud “imagine[s] that the oceanic feeling became connected with religion later on” in cultural practices.
The second chapter delves into how religion is one coping strategy that arises out of a need for the individual to distance himself from all of the suffering in the world.
(…)
The third chapter of the book addresses a fundamental paradox of civilization: it is a tool we have created to protect ourselves from unhappiness, and yet it is our largest source of unhappiness. People become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the frustration which society imposes in the service of its cultural ideals. Freud points out that advances in science and technology have been, at best, a mixed blessing for human happiness. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
Science and technology generated by our engineers and designers, like those on Substack Team, provide us with the tools that we use to coordinate our activities. We have an opportunity to leverage these for the greater good. This is something about which I have been attempting to articulate over the past several months. I am hopeful.
So it goes. I must get myself ready to take the 10 AM to 4:30 PM shift at Daily Provisions down at Q and Connecticut NW here in Washington, DC. If you are in the neighborhood, drop by!
Onward!
Click a button. Any button…
Yes Hal, we can keep spreading the message of light. Support each other and build community.
“Onward!” — that’s the one that stuck with me most. You open with this haunting image of your father’s death and then pivot to a call to action: every choice we make is a vote for the kind of world we want. The line about using your last years “pouring out what has been gathered” really hits — especially since you’re doing it consciously through the foundation and your writing.
The piece moves between personal grief, family legacy, and this bigger idea that we’re all shaping civilization whether we mean to or not. There’s this urgency in it that’s compelling — almost like a manifesto written at dusk.
The other thread running through everything is this existential wrestling with meaning — you keep circling back to “What is the point?” Not in a despairing way, but in a serious, probing one. You bring in thinkers like Ernest Becker and Freud, talking about the denial of death and oceanic feelings, but then you ground it in your own daily life — clocking into work, wrestling with purpose at this stage of life.
It’s rare to see writing that holds both the cosmic and the mundane so steadily.