The skill of writing is

✍🏼

About ten years ago, my brother gave me an original photo over which he’d written, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which people can think.” It doesn’t really matter who said it, but it does matter that it made its way to me, and in a world where we don’t keep many physical copies when we move 11 times in 11 years, it’s stayed with me.

Every week that I publish a letter, it first goes out to all subscribers via email and then lives here in the archive. I can (and have) edited letters after sending them, but those minor changes don’t apply to the version that’s already in your inbox. In this way, when I hit publish, there’s no going back.

As someone who can be a little indecisive, it’s actually pretty cathartic to put something out there and know that any next moves will come from someone other than me. It’s also a bit presumptuous to plant a flag with the written word, to tell you that I’ve figured something out, at least for this moment, at least for me, enough to share it.

When I wrote about the work that goes into sitting down to write, I didn’t spend much time on what I get out of it, but it’s this epiphanic payoff at the end of the tinkering that makes me want to share. The math might not work for me tomorrow, and it might not work for you at all, but in the moment I’ve learned something about myself, and in the reading, I hope you learn something about yourself as well.

If the skill of writing is to create a context for others, the thrill of writing is to open the door and watch people walk through.