What to say when it’s all been said.

Does the world need another person pouring out their innermost thoughts with unnecessary solemnity, forcing a web host and content delivery network to burn carbon just to salve one’s vanity?

No, of course not!

And yet, I’ve set up this page to enable the pouring-out of my innermost thoughts, and I am apparently hopeful of subjecting you to it. Or perhaps you will subject yourselves to it.

Look away! Close the tab! Shut down your device and extricate yourself from the void while you still can!

If you are resolved to stay, though, there’s something I want you to know.

I’m not evil. I don’t hate anybody, not really. I’ve been as much of a citizen and as little of a burden as I could manage for as long as such measurements have been within my purview.

What’s more, I’ve had a happy life, generally. I grew up in Canada in undeniable privilege and I live there still. I recognize the forces of colonialism at work in the inheritance of my country. Canada is not alone in this. Nearly every nation on earth carries at least a small amount of blood and injustice in its formation; some more, some less.

Too often these days, I find my eyes downcast, downcast at the state of the world, the rapaciousness of its people, the injustice of its institutions. I just can’t make sense of the evidence. Is this all we are? After all this time? After how far we’ve come?

I can’t abide it. If one can present evidence on the mess we’re in, then one can also present hope in the possibility that we can find our way out of it.

So welcome to the place where I’ll try to write some more goodness into the world. It’s not artifice if I really want it, right?

But I don’t deceive myself. I know that if I had not written this or any of the things I hope to write in these pages, that if I aborted the entire enterprise before it ever began, nothing much would change.

A moment for the affirmative, please. A good act, fragile in its birth and beset by danger and challenge every moment of its existence, can survive the onslaught and create a moment of joy in someone. Actions begin as thoughts, and if the thinking and recording of good thoughts becomes frequent and consistent enough in enough peoples’ lives, surely what must follow is a torrent of decency that overcomes our problems and whisks us into the better future we’ve so often imagined for ourselves.

I believe in the power of the written word to focus our energy into goodness and to build us up into forces for good.

If I think of goodness, and write of goodness, and if I buttress it with action, and if enough others see some sense in it, then maybe it’ll make a difference.