On Beginnings

Welcome to 2025! We made it through the first ten days 🎉 Beginnings are sometimes the hardest things, so let's congratulate ourselves on making it this far. It's a new year, and we can do this 💪
Speaking of beginnings, it's time to get this newsletter off to a proper start. I want to introduce myself, first, then share my goals for this newsletter, what you can expect to find here every week. Finally, I want to give a brief sampling of what that will be.
So, onward to the introduction!
Who Am I?
I'm 45 years old (shout-out to my Gen-X peers). I was born in Texas, I went to school in Arkansas, I got my first job out of college (as an optical engineer) in Maryland, I became a programmer in California, and I currently live in British Columbia.
Along the way, I worked as everything from a busboy to a secretary to a writer for NASA's Public Affairs Office. I lived in Ireland for six months. I was homeless twice. I got married, spent three years cutting my own firewood in the Ozark Mountains, and survived a once-in-a-generation pandemic before getting divorced. I remember the hope and joy when the Berlin Wall fell, and the shock and sorrow when the Twin Towers went up in flames.
That doesn't mean I claim to have any special wisdom over anyone else. But I've got some background context that I think can be helpful as we all try to make sense of the world around us. And some sympathy for multiple sides of current issues that keeps me from reducing their complexity to rabble-rousing soundbites.
What Am I Doing Here?
With that in mind, what I want to do is share that context, both from my own experience and from what I've learned from others, in the hopes that it helps us live, well, better lives. I think context can turn down the temperature on some political disagreements. I think it can make the world more interesting. And I think it can help us make better decisions, even as we might not agree with each other on what those decisions are.
In practical terms, each week I'll be picking a topic to write about, offering multiple perspectives, in (hopefully) a bit more depth than I've seen elsewhere. I don't want to cover familiar territory, so much as fill in the gaps in the coverage I've seen.
Some weeks the topic will be political, some weeks it'll be more about writing and publishing, some weeks it'll be about pop culture or technology. But every week I want to dig beneath the surface of the theme, to reveal more of the complexity hidden there.
What's Next?
The theme I've chosen for next week is "Keeping Score." This is a concept I've seen pop up in multiple circles, from writing advice (tracking word counts), to political coverage, to the ways people conduct relationships. I want to talk about all the different ways this framing gets used, to tease apart and show how it can be helpful and where it can be harmful.
In the coming weeks, I plan to also look at learning a new language, at how we organize our time, and at how we can mistake the familiar for the comfortable. If you have an idea for a future theme, something you'd like to see discussed in depth, please let me know!
Until next week, then: I wish you peace, and support in whatever your goals are for this year ❤️