The Witness Chronicles, 1/13/25

Something different

Feb 13, 2025

group of people watching concert — Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash

The Remarkable: Taking Things Personally

Shaking off the weight of the world

This originally appeared in my other newsletter, The Remarkable. I’m putting up here because I think it reflects my state of mind in the middle of all this crap. Patience.

Note, I started writing this last weekend but got sick with a nasty head cold so I took a break. As a result you’re getting this later than usual but this newsletter is not time sensitive.

These have been heavy weeks and it’s not over yet. And there’s not much sign of things lightening up. To make things worse, it’s been bright and sunny but too brutally cold to get out of the house with subzero wind chills. Not much relief ahead from that either.

But spring will inevitably come. Meanwhile I’m missing my daily walks and watching too much TV, always a sign that things are off kilter. Hearing the news this morning about warrantless ICE raids on businesses made me mad and a little nauseous, but I got over it. Wrote my way through it, which you can read over at The Witness Chronicles.

Years ago I had a strange little book called something like How to Be a Successful Consultant. The strangeness came from the writer’s voice, a folksy guy dishing out practical advice based on his own experience. Don’t remember much beyond that except for one story that really stuck with me.

He talked about meeting a psychotherapist who said there was one piece of advice, that if followed, would solve 90% of his client’s problems. The advice was ‘don’t take it personally’. Truer words were never said.

Taking something personally implies that something was targeted at you. But whatever it is, it is almost certainly not targeted at you, so why waste energy on it?

Being a political commentary writer tests this truth every day. There are an exceptional number of awful things being unleashed on Americans right now, dangerous and spiteful things, nightmarish things. It’s pretty easy to let those things overtake your sense of hope and any optimism you may have in reserve.

But, like spring, life goes on. Soon I’ll be walking and soon after that I’ll be able to sit in the Zen garden and meditate instead of being a wallfacer here in my apartment. Wallfacer is a description of a Zen meditator who even when in a group, faces a wall while meditating to help with focus.

The acts of facing a blank wall and not taking things personally are related. Both actions are ways of reserving your personal power, that experience that helps you get through the tougher parts of life. It’s very easy to squander those reserves via frustration at events or circumstances we have no control over.

So, don’t take it personally. Got that?

We finally got a day above freezing with some sun and I got my first walk in five days, which felt great and helped me purge some of the news out of my head. My writing always feels clearer to me when I can get out and let my mind wander a bit.

To be honest, my focus in recent weeks has been on the storm going on in DC and my other newsletter. So, I’ve been remiss here. That will change. Here in western New York, we are having a cold winter after years of mild ones and sometimes it feels like hibernation time.

Normally, I could let my focus on politics go and look more towards the natural world, but I admit to being angry about what is going on right now and how petty and egotistic it all is. Not a feeling I am comfortable with and I have to get past it and not take it personally, though it feels very personal right now.

That’s the challenge with dishing out advice. It can come back to bite you. But it is my creative outlet these days and it gives a lot back to me as readers share my concerns about the fate of our democracy. My readership here is tiny and feedback is minimal, but the political stuff reaches a more significant number of people, still a tiny number but slowly growing.

Having an audience is invaluable to a creator. I’d even argue that you cannot grow without that exposure. I learned that as a young man playing original music in a band back in the late seventies and early eighties. I was a terrible player until joining that band and finding myself excited and in the company of other driven artists in the making.

There was a lot of hunger in my city for the kind of music we were pursuing and we booked a significant gig early on. With that target, our focus sharpened and we practiced and wrote on a more than full time schedule. And we went out and played a set of originals to a room full of three hundred people, most kids who were avid music fans.

It was an amazing experience but later when we listened to a recording of that set (we recorded everything), we sounded very tiny and not very powerful, though the audience liked it. It just solidified our desire to get better and more professional. If we had stayed in the basement, that never would have happened.

This story segues into that don’t take it personally thing. Fans are incredibly non-judgemental but you cannot take that as an excuse to stay at the same level. You owe that fan loyalty a constantly improving experience. You have to earn their attention.

As a writer I always keep that in mind, even when I am cranking out a thousand words a day and publishing nearly every day. That writing and publishing rate has improved my voice immeasurably just in the past few years. And that is after thirty years of writing, nine books and endless other forms of writing.

I firmly believe this applies to anything we do with passion, in fact it might define passion in the creative arts, which in my definition includes the making of almost anything.

Challenging times tend to hone focus in the same way standing in front of a screaming audience of kids for the first time does. Real time is not the same as a lot of our time. It’s the appeal of Zen in my personal life, that quest for those moments in time when we are fully there.

If I have a goal it is to be fully there.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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