Category: writing

The bonds of experience

In this response you wrote:

“I think joy and hope also require consciousness. Hope is almost always a choice to value oneself, in my experience, and joy is almost always a choice to celebrate value in oneself or the world. Maybe it’s that order and kindness and hope and joy are connecting forces, and fear is disconnecting. Maybe it’s that simple. What do you think?”

My thoughts on the topic are probably not especially profound but, in the spirit of sharing a virtual pint, I’ll offer an answer. I’d say that whether chaos, fear, etc. are breaking or bonding forces depends on which direction they’re going: from the inside out, or from the outside in. There’s a scene in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (I’m guessing from prior posts that you’re familiar with her work) where Shevik says that the only source of brotherhood (or sisterhood, or friendship…) is shared suffering. I read The Dispossessed when I was a teenager, and it’s been decades since then, but that insight — that a brief period of shared suffering can forge a stronger bond than a lifetime of shared good times (not that good times should be avoided) — has stayed with me ever since. In other words, my feeling is that external negative forces, or negative feelings forcibly induced by external conditions, can help create the most enduring connections possible.

That said, I admit that confusion and fear emanating from the inside are disruptive. Nor do they require much consciousness; they’re more like manifestations of instinctive self-preservation or panic. Also, I admit that external negative forces aren’t intrinsically creative or connecting — it’s their catalytic effect on latent kindness, courage, and internal conviction that does the magic. So, in short, I agree with your view and feel no need to improve your definition. But agreeing with you straight out would have been too boring.

Besides, bringing up the Le Guin book sparked another question I’d like to ask. Although there are exceptions, most of the stories that continue to resonate in my life have something that separates them from ordinary experience: fantasy, scientific speculation, a wide cultural gap, etc. I’m guessing that those kinds of settings let me step outside myself, let go of my opinions, and be more receptive to other viewpoints — in much the same way that some folks who are allergic to mainstream religion can accept the teachings of a mystic from a remote land, even if the precepts are little different from what’s preached by the pastor down the street. Do you agree, and do you find using unfamiliar settings valuable enough that you’re going to continue writing in the sf/fantasy genre?

Best Wishes

Anonymous

I don’t mind having my definitions improved. Conversations like this are more like cooking than like carpentry (oh, there she goes again with the metaphors….). I’d rather think of these ideas as a multi-course meal than something that must be nailed perfectly together. There are very few 90-degree angles in my approach to life.

It’s been interesting thinking about brother/sisterhood. I’ve really been chewing on it, because it’s not something I generally feel, and on some level that bothers me, I guess. I see it as loyalty based on a specific shared experience (or set of experiences), rather than on the character of the individual people we’re ‘hooding with. If we have seen things, done things (or had them done to us) that we believe other people cannot understand, then we have a bond because we were there. We know. That word know is tricky; it’s not about imagination or empathy or fellow-feeling, it’s about direct parity of experience. It’s an experiential kinship: you are like me because we shared this thing. We know each other in a way that others don’t know us.

And I think that’s true. I think in many ways we can never “know” each other, which is one reason we have art, and psychology, and ecstatic mechanisms like drugs or drumming or dance. Why we have ritual. Why sex means something different when the people involved wish to be emotionally as well as physically connected. I admire humans for all the ways we try to understand things we cannot know.

And yet I find that I much prefer to connect on the individual level, rather than the “we band of brothers” plane. Perhaps that’s because I see people (myself included) using experience to divide ourselves so absolutely from one another. You can’t understand, we say, as if it were the end of the discussion. Experience does differentiate us, absolutely, but does it always have to be divisive? Here’s a low-voltage but common example: when a new mother tells me with that particular combination of satisfaction and pity that I can never know what it’s like to be a parent because I have no children of my own, I want to punch her, I really do — she’s right, and she’s also involved in some sort of social and emotional point-scoring that I find bewildering and somewhat Animal Farm-esque. Why can’t we just acknowledge difference? Why does some difference have to be better than others?

I know it’s not that simple. I do know that. I’ve had someone diminish and devalue my experience because they don’t share it and don’t, in fact, understand it, and I don’t like the feeling. And when I meet someone who I believe “gets it” because they have similar experience, I do feel a resonance. We can connect in that way. And I have seen people almost certainly save their own lives by finding a “kinship” group to whom they did not have to explain, justify, or apologize for their own experience. A group who kept them safe and gave them respite.

I think most people do find brother/sisterhood in bad times rather than good. I worry that in this culture, which is so frightened of difference, the result will be a bunker mentality that only divides us further.

The thing is, I believe passionately that people can bond over shared joy, shared dreams, shared love as well as over the traumatic stuff. Suffering and enduring hardship can catalyze our potential for being bigger, braver, more ourselves than we might have imagined; but I really, really think that love and joy and hope can do it too.

So here I am, answering a question you didn’t ask and not the one you did. Hmm, setting, setting. I think for me setting is a tool rather than a goal: in other words, I’ll probably never write a novel just to create a cool world for people to wander around in. I wrote Solitaire as speculative fiction in part because it was the only way I could imagine getting Jackal into her own head in a way that would be an undiluted experience for her and the reader both. I also wrote it as spec fic because that was all I could imagine myself writing at the time — imagine my surprise to find myself splashing about in the mainstream. The Kansas book and the mountain book are set in the present day US because that’s how I can best support the journey of the characters. Putting these folks in Ko, or Darwath, or even 12th century China, would make it impossible for me to tell their particular stories.

Having said that, part of the fun of the new books is that the settings are unfamiliar, at least to me. I’m learning about different kinds of community and different ways of life. I’m having a whale of a time thinking how I can enter into the experience of someone who shares elements of my culture, but whose external landscape is so different from mine. I don’t think I need specifically to write sf or fantasy in order to go to unfamiliar places; and with those settings, my goal is not to say to readers Look how different this is, but rather See how our places shape us.

Consciousness

I recently finished reading your novel, Solitaire, and was astonished at how good it was. But you’ve probably already heard the same many times, so I’ll be more specific.

First, the plot rang true. I’ve spent my adult life working for a single, large corporation. They’ve provided interesting work, have treated me well, and I’m a loyal company man. Probably that’s how affairs will continue until I either die or retire. Yet I know that if, for some bizarre reason, the welfare of the company depended on me being crushed and humiliated, then so it would be. Just as in your story, there would be no malice, there would even be kindness to the degree possible,­ but it would be done.

Second, your characters came to life. Again, that’s pretty general, so more specifically… I was able to dislike and yet feel sorry for Jackal’s mom. I felt, even at first introduction, a simultaneous dislike and grudging admiration of both Gavin and Crichton — the same kind of feeling I‘ve gotten in person when talking to executives, not being able to help admiring them even when I know damn well I’m being manipulated. And, I got teary-eyed at Jackal’s and Snow’s reunion.

Third, the book was joyful. Most great novels are — even if reading academic reviews would make you think they’re gloomy and ponderous. And what I most want to say is that I enjoyed the optimism of your novel and hope that your future work is similar in that respect. Please understand that I’m not trying to give fan guidance on what you ought to write. I’m just offering a thought, a hope, and letting you know what about your work appealed to me. But life can be painful at times and, during those times, coming across a living, breathing, believably optimistic story about what it is to be a human can be a very big deal.

Last, I wanted to let you know that I’m a middle aged, straight, more-or-less conservative research scientist (your Crichton would call me a lab coat nerd if she were in a good mood). If you were able to make your story gripping to someone so different than how you describe yourself, then I’m guessing that the appeal of your writing must be nigh well universal.

Best Wishes,
J.

P.S. I saw that you used to be an executive at Wizards Of The Coast. My younger daughter has been a Pokémon fan for several years now. Congratulations on your marketing.

For me, one of the most complex treatments of ambivalence to create in Solitaire was the corporate culture. I have few mixed feelings about bad companies — they just suck, you know? But the good ones are less easily labeled. I spent five years in executive positions at Wizards of the Coast (which was for me an excellent experience in general, although astonishingly hard in particular moments), and in various positions at smaller companies before that (almost uniformly Suck City). The thing that made Wizards an excellent place for me was not that it was seamlessly good, or smart, or efficient. It wasn’t (oh, the stories….). But it was a place where a person of skill could, given a good manager, create an excellent experience for herself. Perhaps this is the best we can hope for, this combination of opportunity and support, but I have to believe it can be better than that, or at least more organized. When I led the project management team at Wizards, I tried to carve out a space in the company in which anyone could have an excellent experience. I expect that not everyone did, but I do believe that project management was considered a “better” part of the company to work in because of the way we built the team.

I get restless and impatient when people talk about corporations being “evil” and “greedy” and “heartless.” Corporations are big stews of people who often make uninformed or unimaginative or fearful decisions, which is just as bad in effect but makes a difference to me on some level. I find stupidity more forgivable, or at least more easily rectified, than evil or greed. What’s interesting is that I’m much more willing to characterize whole corporations as “supportive of employees” or “socially conscious” or “learning organizations” — I don’t have so much trouble with these kinds of generalizations. I think this is because for a whole corporation to be perceived as actively “good” in some way, a lot of people have to make a conscious agreement about how to behave and then live up to it on a daily basis. Chaos requires less consciousness and courage than order (or kindness).

I think joy and hope also require consciousness. Hope is almost always a choice to value oneself, in my experience, and joy is almost always a choice to celebrate value in oneself or the world. Maybe it’s that order and kindness and hope and joy are connecting forces, and fear is disconnecting. Maybe it’s that simple. What do you think?

Anyway, as a writer I’m interested in connection. I will write about fear and sorrow and the fractures within, and between, people because that’s part of the human terrain that I map in all my work. But I believe in joy and hope and growth and love. They are things I’d like to see more of in the world, and I hope I am never so sundered from them that I would want to write a book designed to separate the reader from them as well. I can imagine it. Nicola and I have talked about what might happen to our writing if the other died, and I can see the bitter books that I might wish to unleash on the world. I think I’d probably have a talent for making those people real too, and perhaps there would be some value in it, but I don’t like to read those books, and it would be a challenge to write one that I could be proud of. But I can imagine a state of soul in which it would seem like the thing to do. And if it were a choice between writing something like that and not writing at all…. well, those are the interesting questions, aren’t they?

I’m guessing that Crichton would only call you a lab coat nerd if you did something she didn’t like (grin). And I’m glad you liked the book. Cheers.

More random

Thanks for your description of “angles”, “filters”, and the Interpersonal Gap.

Re your mention of the Interpersonal Gap, I further educated myself here.

It reminds me of the psych-book, Games People Play, re word/body language play.

That is infinity. Apparently, it boils down to skillful and appropriate use of intention and interpretation as priorities in order to profit from conversation, personally, writer/reader, or artist/viewer.

You mentioned “discerning plot from unusual angles” and you mentioned this as best found in film. However, a film cannot be randomly read (another advantage for the traditional book concept). The film can project a sense of randomness, disjointed layers, but only one sequence exists.

A digital movie or website could exhibit randomly though, thus alleviating ‘choice’. Page-flipping could be eliminated also. Current E-books offer this, and they could avoid repetition of sections, which can happen with manual random reading. Reader-choice could be allowed or attenuated.

I meant, ‘gathering’ the plot via random reading, and moving through many tentative plots in the process.

In terms of fiction, all writing loses control to the needs of the reader. Convention is necessary to have an audience, yet the most successful styles, as I theorize here, allow (conventional, sequential) readers the ability to ‘write’ their own book, whereby even ‘profundity’ or ‘apotheosis’ may be perceived. The artistic product is an insight-vehicle for the reader, albeit a guided tour (smile).

Yet, both comedians and judges seem to be able to specifically control their delivery and the intended effect.

You ended with, “Filters matter. Often they are integrated at such an unconscious level that it takes a lot of work to dig them out. But it’s work worth doing, in my opinion.”

Yes input/output filters/embellishers are eternal problems and capabilities.

Solitaire seems appropriate for this era.

Thanks for the link –” it’s a useful document.

I’m not sure I would compare Games People Play directly to the Interpersonal Gap model, mostly because so much of Games (as I remember it, and it’s been a while) is concerned with conscious or unconscious bad intentions, and I associate the Interpersonal Gap with good intentions gone wrong. For me, it’s about clarity. Of course, we can have bad intentions and be clear about them, but then it seems to me that we are not playing games, just being clearly nasty. I find it difficult to understand how people experience this as a good thing, but mileage varies.

The ability to clearly articulate intentions, filters (coding) and effects in real-time is perhaps the most powerful communication skill I know of. I am impressed by it even in people I don’t particularly like, because their skill (and mine) makes it much easier to navigate the interpersonal friction. It incorporates awareness of self and other, and the willingness to acknowledge difference, fear and vulnerability in the service of greater connection. I’m fortunate to live with someone who has this skill in spades, and as it happens I like her very much (grin), and find our conversations rich, sometimes astonishing, sometimes terrifying, always connecting.

I believe I understand better now what you mean by random. It’s interesting to imagine moving through tentative plots toward a final understanding of the plot as it exists. A new literary concept: Shroedinger’s Plot. I only do this as a reader if my linear reading experience becomes boring or stressful. When that happens, I’ll jump around in the book to see if I can get a sense of what’s to come without necessarily connecting all the dots. I think that’s as close as I get to what you’ve described. In the best of book-worlds, I like to start at the beginning and have the story swallow me whole –” and I always begin by hoping for the best.

I would paraphrase what you’re saying about writing as “everyone reads her own book.” This is, for me, related to my notions about books and multiple entry points. It’s true that any meaning (profundity, resonance) to be found in a book depends on the experience and values and desires of the reader as much as those of the writer. When these intersect in story in a way that is meaningful to both parties, well, that’s a fine moment. That’s the connection that I seek as an artist.

Riffing

Finished Solitaire two days ago; it’s still ringing in my thoughts. I’d almost given up on it around page 50; you found your stride later, and I’m glad I stuck with it.

Twice (twice!) I found myself tearing up (and I don’t cry *that* easily) –” both times with joy, at the human truths you gracefully set up and then depicted, cleanly, showing-not-telling, without a bit of the maudlin or the melodramatic.

Nicely done! Just wanted to pass on my compliments directly. Keep writing –” I’ll keep looking for your next novels.

Michael

Thanks for sticking with it. I’m glad it became more to your liking, and that you did not find it maudlin or melodramatic. I worry sometimes about my propensity for what I think of as riffing, which is akin to taking a running start at an emotional cliff and then flinging myself off, clinging to a rope of exuberant prose. Riffing is great fun, but not always great writing. The last two paragraphs of the elevator scene are a riff, and so is most of Day 424 in VC, and the entire reunion scene with Snow, and they were all fun to write, even the hard ones.

One way I know I’m on a right track in my own work is that it makes me cry to write it, not because it’s deathless prose but because I’m getting close to some kind of truth that is right for the story, a joy or sadness or exhilaration, or those piercing moments that are these combined.

I, too, am looking for my next novels (grin) and I know they’re in here somewhere. If I could get away with riffing all the time, I’d be on Book 37 by now.

What next?

I really liked solitaire and I want to read another one of your novels. I don’t know if you have another one in the works or not but if you do please release it soon, and if not get to work :). I would like to read a second novel to solitaire. I think it would work because I want to know how she turned out. Did she get over anti-social behavior? Did she make a lot of money? How did KO turn out? Does she still live in the NNA? What happened to snow? I think it would be good and you could put new problems maybe KO double crossed her, there is a problem with the online thing and she gets stuck in VC longer than supposed to, or any thing else you can think of as a new problem or a new plot. I know you could make a great new book and it would be a shame not to write more about Snow or Jackal.

I have a question though. Who killed the security guard and where did the other go?

And I hope you make a second book to solitaire or write another novel because your first novel was really good.

anonymous

I am sorry to disappoint you, but no sequel. I’m glad the characters came alive for you, even if does mean they are still rattling around in your brain, demanding to be continued. They do that in my head sometimes too. Of course I have my notions of what happens to everyone, but I expect you have ideas about that too, as will other people who read the book and liked it. We will all have to be content with our notions for now.

I’d be interested to know how you define anti-social behavior. I think Jackal’s probably the most well-adjusted person in the bar most nights (unless Snow is there). I’ll bet all those tourists feel just a little safer when she’s around, which may or may not be what they were hoping for.

One security guard was in the pay of Steel Breeze, and set up the initial situation with the elevators being stuck. I’ll bet he was really confused when Jackal did his job for him. He killed the other guard, and Jackal herself was fortunate not to end up at the bottom of the access stairs with a broken neck.

If you are interested, you can learn more about my next novels from this previous post.

Escape

I was depressed/frustrated with marriage/work/life and was spending a couple of days alone. I needed to escape into another world, which is what reading good fiction does for me. Periodically I decide to diverge from my usual list of favorites and Solitaire caught my attention about two minutes into B&N. Ursula K. Le Guin is one of those special favorites and with her endorsement I felt compelled to try you out. You immediately sucked me in, I read the tale non-stop, exercised my emotions, gave much fodder for my sub-conscious mind to chew on as I slept. This will brew within me for some time and I look forward to your next.

Thank you.

Jeff

I’m the same way with good fiction, I fall down into it and lose myself while the everyday chunters on around me. It’s been like that since I was a child and would bring stacks of books home from the library and escape into them. What a gift, a story that I can immerse myself in, that feels true, that engages and involves me, that makes me feel and think, laugh and cry.

It amuses me that “escapist” is so often used as a synonym for “crap fiction,” as if a story’s ability to draw a reader completely into itself is somehow a bad thing. I suppose it’s like much else in my life –” the conflict between my relativist point of view, and the wider worldview that seems to be more comfortable with absolute standards and either-or categorizations. But it is far too pretty a day in Seattle to grump, so I won’t.

Since you are a fan of Ursula (whom I admire profoundly as a person and a writer), you perhaps already know about her recently published text of, and thoughts on, the Tao Te Ching. Beautiful stuff.

I hope your frustration is less and your world is sunny, emotionally if not meteorologically. If you brew up any thoughts you’d like to share, come on back.

Public transit tears

I waited anxiously for the trade paperback of Solitaire to come out –” I just finished reading it yesterday.

I work in the corporate world, for a company that has been doing a goodly amount of layoffs. I so love that Jackal’s struggle with the ideas of personal identity vs. corporate identity are as much a part of this story as mystery and plot.

The resolution she finds at the story’s end was deliciously layered. Hopeful. It made me cry on public transit. So, so, good.

Please write more novels. Please. Please. 🙂

— naomi

Wow, public transit tears! I do the happy dance. Nicola and I both have a fantasy of seeing a stranger in a public place reading one of our books, and the notion of seeing someone crying over one just makes me want to give you a big hug. Thank you for such a gift.

Layoffs are hard, hard. The company I last worked for did its first major layoff less than three months after I was hired, and it was an unhappy, ill-planned process that taught me a great deal about things not to do in a similar situation. I hope your company is handling it better. There’s never a way to make these things good news, but there are ways to deliver bad news that leave people with some measure of dignity and hope.

You may have read in an earlier pint that I’m actually cooking two novels at the moment, although not with equal focus. The Kansas book is in active preparation, and the mountain book is simmering. I woke up at 3:00 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so ended up in my office at 4:15 AM with a cup of tea and a cat sleeping over the heater, pondering the psychology of guilt (me, not the cat) and writing scenes of hamburgers in a diner and a serious two-in-the-morning argument (ditto). Got a lot of work done, and oh, the mixed feelings about that….if my peak writing time turns out to be 4:15 AM, I will be really pissed. And as for what Nicola would make of it, well, I won’t even go there… instead I will go join her for a beer and some lovely Indian takeaway. I hope your day will include some equally nice treat.

Random Solitaire

I had caught the title and cover art among the thousands of books at B&N and picked it up, liked it.

I liked your poetic sense. To avoid seeing the plot too quickly, I selected pages at random to read, as I often do. It’s good for me.

Finding science to be stranger than fiction, I’m looking for something to make sense of it. Your book helps by confirming some of my thoughts on the world stage. That’s a relief, like a doctor diagnosing my novel disease with a traditional name.

Anonymous

Such a relief to know the book is actually in B&N. Another thing writers worry about. I’m glad it struck you out of so many, that’s another piece of good news. Thanks for taking a chance with your money.

I am not sure anyone has ever before characterized me as helping to make sense of science, and if you’d been my lab partner in high school you would find it as funny as I do. I’d be interested to hear more about your thoughts, confirmed or otherwise.

I was intrigued by the idea of Solitaire as an experience unmoored from plot, and did a little random reading in it myself. I’m not sure what I would make of it as a new reader, except that the corporate culture aspect of the story is more prominent than I expected, and they really do drink a lot of beer.

And then I got lost in the story right around the point where Jackal has her first aftershock and winds up on the floor in Solitaire. I’ve been reading for the last hour and a half instead of working. It’s been lovely to spend time with these people again. They are all special to me. It means a lot to me to find that they are still themselves, that their story still carries me the way it did through all those months and years of discovering it and wrestling it down onto paper. I know it’s not the done thing to say so, but I love my book.

The point

A special virtual toast to Michael Ventura, author of the essay “The Talent of the Room”, which I recommended earlier this year in my thoughts on writing. He’s graciously given me permission to post his essay. I’m grateful.

Every time I read this piece, something different resonates with me. Right now, as I bang my forehead bloody against plot, I’m drawn to this sentence: Sometimes it takes weeks or months even to begin writing. This is a hard truth for me. It’s easy for me to feel that if I’m not producing word count, I am not working hard enough, which leads down the cheerful road of I’m lazy, I am undeserving, I will fail utterly, everyone will point at me and laugh, the cat will pee on me, Nicola will leave me, the planet will explode…. And yet I know, as I’ve said before, that it’s not a race, that there is no relationship in writing between quanitity and quality (and I mean no relationship: more is not necessarily better, but neither is less), and that, as Michael Ventura goes on to say, the point will always be how you behaved, what you felt, what you thought, what you dared, what you fled, how you lived life, how life lived you, alone, in that room.

Enjoy.

Ambiguity

Re: Cover of the Solitaire trade paperback.
It is striking and hits the right emotional chord for the book. (Although oddly as I sit and consider it now, it does not seem to relate much to the story itself.)

Re: Solitaire
I really enjoyed the novel. It really struck an emotional chord with me. A couple of things that I found interesting:

  • The virtual confinement environment was in many ways similar to the peaceful environment that I try to visualize when meditating.

  • It took me a lot of thinking, a little therapy, and a lot of 12 step meetings before I found that (for myself anyway) there was tremendous personal growth in the process that Jackal succinctly summarizes as “I turned over every single rock inside myself and found all the worms. And then I ate them”. I’m curious if you saw the effects of Jackal’s experience in VC as positive or negative. I thought the novel was somewhat ambiguous on that point. I saw a lot of emotional growth, a refined sense of self, a better personal boundaries come out of the experience even though the way she came by that growth left its own emotional scars. (Doesn’t it always seem to work like that!)

  • Reading your website I noticed that you mentioned that you had gotten some feedback that your male characters were weak. I did notice all seem to be very secondary characters and a lot of them, while not evil in any sense, seem to betray someone in some fashion. I cannot decide if in the end this gave the book an unbalanced feel or not, certainly it was not grossly out of balance evidenced by the fact I cannot make up my mind.

Just a completely random thought that popped into my head, was there every any discussion of marketing Solitaire as a young adult novel? I only ask because I noticed it has many of the characteristics of some of the better ones.

Sorry to ramble on so long and probably quite disjointedly. I really enjoyed your novel and will be keeping my eye open for both your past and your future work. Keep writing.

All the best.
Rob

It’s always nice to know when someone enjoys Solitaire enough to want to read something else I’ve written. If you’ve poked around on the site, you know that some of my published stories (updated in 2008: “Strings”, “And Salome Danced” and “Dangerous Space”) and several essays are available, but there’s no harm reminding people.

I agree with you about the cover, and I think an emotional connection is more important than a factual/textual one. I suppose that’s because for me the heart of any story is emotional. I am pleased to have had two covers that do this, rather than simply sending a pure “marketing” signal –” like, for example, all those courtroom thrillers with gavels or jury boxes on the cover, or chick lit in pastel colors with the titles in curly writing. When a reader sees Solitaire in the bookstore, she may know what it isn’t (chick lit, for sure), but she won’t know exactly what it is –” and curiosity is a powerful force.

No one ever discussed marketing Solitaire as a young adult novel, at least not with me. I’m curious to know what you think the YA characteristics are (that’s a real question, not a defensive one –” I have great admiration for good YA fiction).

As far as I can tell, the only person in the book who doesn’t betray someone on some level is Snow, and that may only be because there was no practical reason. Snow’s quite pragmatic.

If by ambiguous you mean that the book doesn’t tell the reader how to feel about a particular experience, then Solitaire is ambiguous in many (perhaps most) respects. That’s deliberate. I think very few important experiences are purely positive or negative in the long term, partly because there are very few (well, I can’t think of any) experiences that aren’t susceptible to the influence of joy or love or fear. These are the “big three” world-shapers in my pantheon; the way they jostle and recombine in particular situations is something that interests me in life and work. I think the jostling is where the scars come from, as well as the strokes and thumps we all give each other in the everyday world. And yep, I agree with you that’s how growth works in the human world, although I do believe it’s possible to grow without fear if, well, if we weren’t so afraid to. There goes that snake, eating its tail again.

Cheers, and thanks for these interesting comments.