Connections
Early on in this pandemic/quarantine I wrote about the need to make connections with old friends, colleagues and mentors. The immediate occasion for that advice was a trade magazine for which I write a monthly column; but like everything else I publish there it’s less about the immediate work environment and more about life in general. I’ve tried to use my time of late in a similar way, though it has not always panned out as carefully as I had advised. Rather, it’s more like I looked up around me and saw that connections had been forming all along and that I was now happily and wisely ensconced in them. That realization came over the weekend, as I was slowly trudging through a pretty complicated book called “The Human Condition” by one of my favorite political philosophers, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It’s the kind of reading I’ve been doing lately to try to make sense of what’s been going on nationally. Not that Arendt was writing about a plague. She was, however, always writing about the capacity to be generous and creative in public, often in miserable moments of history – whether under Nazism, during the Holocaust, or amidst violent public...Read more