A Confession?

Yes it is five in the morning...no sleep for the weary.

So I just finished watching a Hitchens interview where he talks a little about the fact that he had always known from a young age he would be a writer. He said he knew this because that is what he was, he could never imagine himself doing anything else. Which got me thinking how much I've always envied people who've had this same experience. I've thought long and hard about who I am and what I should be doing and in doing so realised I don't have a 'knack', as Hitch put it, for anything whatever. At least not for anything monetarily tangible. What I have discovered is the truth that it really does take all kinds to make our secular experiment work.

Mark Steyn does a beautiful job making my point in a different context. When asked how he reconciles, so to speak, all of the different things he writes about, music and theatre ect, he says that in an ideal world he would love to write more about music, theatre, and film but the fact is we don't live in an ideal world. He goes on to say that at some point if there are great things going on in the world and you want to say something about them and you don't, it's not going to be any concelation to have a great cd collection as western civilization falls apart. That if you value the freedom to stroll into a piano bar and hear a great singer sing 'The way you look tonight', that even that small experience is at the apex of the whole cultural foundation. You can't "share off the pleasures of a 32 bar song from all the big geopolitical issues, they are explicitly connected".

Perhaps those of us not blessed with the assuredness and talent of Hitch still have an equally important roll to play if only we could realise it. Once we realise that you can't "share off" the neccessity of the plumber from the accountant, or the janitor from the ceo, can we truly take and hold our place with dignity. As much or as little, it's hard to tell right now, as I believe this to be true, I also fear it to be a life long struggle. So I guess the best that we can do is to surround ourselves with people to share that struggle with.