A vintage cartoon from Punch magazine, showing a conductor busking by conducting an orchestra of broken instruments with no musicians to play them.

They made me the student leader of the school orchestra. One day the music teacher was sick and he asked me to conduct. I had no idea what to do, except what I’d seen him doing. So I waved my arms around.

Today I’m fragmented, overwhelmed by what there is still to complete, and also by all there is to start. Somewhere in the middle, there I am, lost between starting and finishing. Flailing.

Yet even no method is still a method. Says the poet Christian Wiman1:

💬 “The truth is our only savior is failure.”

And look at those stats! This is my 200th post here this year. Writing slowly? No, not me.

  1. Christian Wiman, “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians” from Once in the West (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014). ↩︎