Monday Nov 13, 2023

First post: the why of it

Writers write to wrestle with themselves in an uncaring world. A couple of years ago, unexpected and troubling existential fears saw me talking to a therapist for six months. I identified two terrors, both seeming like peering over the edge of a chasm: the specter of climate catastrophe, and the horrific realization that I might well not be around to see my grandchildren turn into adults. Both terrors felt like unimaginable calamities looming toward me. Hence: Looming Void.

I “recovered,” as one hopefully does, but my life now is seized with urgency. I’m deep into a writing project that strikes everyone who knows me as Sisyphean: never-ending and hopeless. Can I complete it in time before … you know, the end? What about the climate crisis? This public journal, Looming Void, tackles those questions by writing weekly about three matters.

10,000 minutes

I approach seventy years of age. Two decades ago, I launched a quixotic writing project, and although I can cite myriad distractions (writing-related and not) over those decades, the reality is that the work isn’t done. Not by a long shot.

A couple of times in October 2023, I asked a family member or friend to act as my “accountability buddy” for a week. The term, reeking of self-help-itis, leaves me cringing, but the buddy process worked. I rang my buddy every evening and informed them whether my day met my work and life standards. Magically, I rose early, acted in a disciplined fashion, labored industriously, honored my values, and focused on what a seventy-year-old with unfinished business must do.

So this public journal acts as my private accountability buddy. I shall sum up the past week of work. What I aimed for, what I achieved, my peaks and troughs, and my lessons for next week.

A week comprises 10,080 minutes, which the actuary in me rounds to 10,000. Every week (Monday) I’ll report on the previous 10,000 minutes. I’m uncertain what form such a report will take, and I’m sure what I write and how I write it will vary. I’ll certainly, in the accountability spirit, assess the week’s work progress, but I also hope to parse my shifting moods in a volatile world.

Mostly I’ll be talking to myself. Hopefully, my honest reflection will buoy your own ambitions toward your dreams.

Monsters

The first of my 2022 anxieties was sheer terror at the looming chasm of the Climate Crisis, a vision of we humans inexorably shuffling towards a plunge down, down into the terrain of a new, warmed, hostile planet.

One of the most evocative phrases encapsulating this terror is “monsters behind the door.” I only heard of this imagery in a recent article by the brilliant David Wallace-Wells and I tracked it down to a Tom Brokaw documentary on the Discovery Channel (take a look on YouTube), seventeen years ago. The documentary’s title says it all: Global Warming: What You Need to Know. In a ten-second morsel, 10:35 into Brokaw’s ninety-minute appeal for a hearing for the climate scientist heroes foretelling the future, youthful Princeton University ecologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Pacala says:

There’s a class of almost instantaneous change that I call monsters behind the door. I call them monsters because were they to occur today, they would be catastrophic.

Stephen Pacala in Tom Brokaw’s Global Warming 2006 documentary

Pacala is probably around my age. Does he now also have grandchildren? At a playground, does he whisper, “begone, monsters behind the door”? Late at night, in November of 2023, the warmest year humanity has ever experienced, does he nurse a drink and rasp, “were they to occur today indeed...”

Of course I acknowledge what Michael Mann and Katherine Hayhoe, among others, say, that doomism is misplaced, counterproductive, and cultivated by the fossil fuel villains. If I was swamped by despair in 2022, today I swing high and I swing low. In this journal, I’ll honor both my steady gaze into the abyss (weekly, I’ll jot down the past week’s most alarming climate crisis news) and my faith in a zero-emissions future (weekly, I’ll also scribble about buoyant countervailing news).

I’m no scientist, no expert at all. But I am a steadfast, rational gleaner, and perhaps, just perhaps, my unflinching gaze upon the Monsters helps you cope and act.

Mortality

Late last year my brother had a quadruple bypass around the time a “calcium score” and angiogram indicated minor blockage in one of my own arteries. I count myself as very fortunate but in the aftermath of that existential shock, even more visceral than climate terrors, I’ve reinvented my diet, exercise, and notions of health. A geek and proud of it, I’ve become more than a little obsessive about matters of food, health, and longevity, and the third leg of this weekly journal will be reflections on what I’m doing and how well it all works. Hopefully you’ll find it of interest.

Brevity

One final thought, on this pause before next week’s opening Looming Void: I won’t “crap on.” I don’t have time to dwell, you’ve your own dragons to slay. I’ll hammer out my thoughts, press the send button, and hit the new week…