The View From Up There
*A Note Before We Begin
Dear reader,
Before we get started, I want to pause for a moment and say thank you.
This is my 300th post.
Somehow our one-year anniversary here on Substack slipped quietly past on March 2nd. I knew it was coming up. I even meant to mark the occasion. But somewhere between the writing, the job search, the changing work schedule, and the general churn of everyday life, the date wandered by while I was looking the other direction.
Change curves have a way of doing that.
Shock. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Confusion. Experimentation. Acceptance.
The familiar stages of grief. For what was. Of what might have been. Or the version of the story we thought we were living.
But most of the time it isn’t dramatic grief. It’s just what I’ve started calling the everylife.
The daily adjustments. The small recalibrations.
The ordinary business of keeping the lights on while the future figures itself out.
A new work schedule. Multiple projects underway. Still looking for a full-time role that fits the next chapter.
And occasionally I find myself wondering where that younger version of me has gone and went off to. The one who never slept, who believed effort alone could bend time, to make space.
He never believed in the 80/20 rule. For him, it had to be 100 percent or it wasn’t worth doing.
When I first began posting here, I assumed daily essays would be easy. After all, I have totes of notebooks and old drafts stacked everywhere; decades of half-finished thoughts waiting patiently for their turn.
What I forgot is that writing still has to live alongside an actual life.
So the daily goal didn’t quite hold.
But if we’re measuring honestly, if I can call it success, I managed 82.191 percent of that promise.
Which feels about right for a human being trying to do a sincere thing.
Right now this little corner of the internet averages a thousand views in 30 days and holds 63 subscribers, with one paid subscriber.
Thank you, Jon.
And three kind souls who have bought me coffee along the way.
Thank you, Mark, Hal, and Margaret.
I began this experiment knowing full well I was unlikely to retire on a vast pile of gold from my writing. The goal was simpler than that.
I made a promise to the little boy I once was; the one who filled notebooks with his stories and wondered if anyone would ever read them.
I wanted to be able to look back and tell him:
We did it.
And we did.
And we’re not stopping.
Writing does something for me, I never thought possible. It soothes that younger self who needed a place for his imagination to live. It comforts the old storyteller I suspect I’m becoming. And it keeps this middle-aged wordsmith’s blade sharp enough to keep working at it.
There has been some criticism along the way. Some from outside voices. Most from the more familiar voices inside my own head.
In the past year, I’ve learned something about both.
I just let those dogs bark.
I no longer feel the need to bite back.
Maybe that’s an 80/20 lesson too.
And if not, I’m quietly hoping God grades on the curve.
Now then.
On to today’s meditation.
A Lenten Meditation - Part 7
Day Nineteen.
When I was a kid in parochial school, I belonged to something called The Flying Club.
For every 100% on an exam you received a star. Twenty consecutive stars meant a free flight in a small airplane at the local airport. The minister’s brother flew the plane; thinking back, I suspect it helped him log hours.
I earned enough stars for one trip before they closed down the club.
The plane was small enough that the world felt close through the windows. Houses became shapes. Roads curved like ribbons. Fields looked stitched together in colors I had never noticed from the ground. I even got to see my mother hanging clothes on the line.
That view didn’t just make the world look smaller.
It made it look beautiful.
I remember marveling at how orderly everything appeared from that height. The complicated places of life. All the ones that felt tangled and immediate down below, now seemed calm from the air. Manageable.
Perspective does that. Because distance rearranges things.
The tower has a view.
That is the first thing worth admitting.
From up there the world looks legible. Patterns appear. Motives seem easier to read. Even chaos begins to resemble something explainable.
The higher you climb, the more convincing that illusion becomes.
Helplessness disappears at altitude.
And helplessness was always the thing I was trying to outrun.
Children learn early in certain rooms.
They learn usefulness. And vigilance.
They learn that competence feels like oxygen.
My tower was not built on pride.
It was built to escape helplessness.
From up there, I could see. I could interpret.
From up there I did not have to feel small.
But height has its own lessons.
There’s a song in Godspell that says it plainly: learn your lessons well. Maybe not necessarily master them, but definitely learn them.
My tower taught me things I still value.
It taught me how to observe. How to think.
How to find patterns where others saw confusion. Those were the real gifts.
But towers also teach subtler lessons, if you stay long enough.
They teach you how distance slowly becomes separation.
From up there the world becomes a landscape. People only become movement inside it.
Problems become puzzles.
And suffering begins to look interpretable rather than shared.
The wilderness story contains a moment like that.
The adversary takes Him to a high place-the top of the temple. The city spreads out below like a map.
It would have been the perfect demonstration: Throw yourself down and let the angels catch you.
From that height the proof would have been undeniable.
But height offers more than spectacle. It offers distance.
Distance from hunger. From weakness.
Distance from the gravity that holds everyone else to the ground.
The wilderness refused the bargain.
No spectacle. No drama.
Just descent.
Nazareth instead of the highest heights.
I understand the temptation.
My tower gave me something real. It made me real.
From up there I could see everything. But the lesson is becoming clearer now.
Seeing everything is not the same as belonging to it.
TW
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