06/05/2024 – On the road

I write to you from drizzly Tours, a lovely provincial town with a royal past and a well-healed present. We are staying in what is clearly the town “Wedding hotel”, a stately building with a spa, almost overly-obliging staff and a fancy reception/seating area, with a photogenic staircase.

There is a lot of history here. Charlemagne’s wife died in Tours in 800 AD, commemorated by the “Tour de Charlemagne”. In 1429, Jean d’Arc met Charles VII here with news of her victory at Orleans. The Gothic Cathedral has 2 ancient rose windows and also vast modern glass designs, achingly high vaulting and extraordinary sandstone facades full of fiddly-bits and bravado carving. It has one of the largest town halls in France, late 19th Century, all flags and fountains, thoroughly splendid/triumphalist. And, of course, it has the Loire river – currently swollen, racing through the bridge arches, engulfing the river-bank trees to a height of several metres. We walked along the river today, in the cold drizzle and listened to it roaring. It was bracing in the best possible way.

We are both fully back on our feet. I looked at Carey on Friday and said, “You’re better”. Finally! I could just see it in his face. Fortunately, it’s proving true.

The other thing I wanted to share this week was my own take on the “attention economy”.

About a month ago I posted on LinkedIn about three of the crappy things that happened to me as a professional, the ones that cracked my faith in how “the world works”. It generated over 7,000 impressions. This week, I deleted it.

Writing about values requires a moral inventory. Over the last few weeks, I’ve experienced other incidents surfacing: times when the argument worked, the line held, the risk paid off, the mistake didn’t blow up, the feedback was well-received. Times which broke in my direction. I didn’t “deserve” the good outcomes (or the “non-outcomes”), any more than I “deserved” the bad ones. But, the good ones did not build my faith the way the bad ones broke it. That was wrong.

I read a book ages ago. The author lost his wife and two of three children in a car crash. He wrote about the moment he stopped asking “what did I do to deserve this?” and became overwhelmed by the recognition of all the gifts, including his lost family, that he had never deserved, but had received nevertheless. I’ve googled variations to find the title, but I don’t think it matters. It is a lesson I have both never forgotten and only just started to properly understand.

I met/meet so many more good people than venal or spiteful ones. Sometimes, “bad” may be the best outcome available. Sometimes, it wasn’t about you at all, you may just be collateral damage.

So, this week, I posted a new article, speaking to this insight. I felt I should share my rising nuance on the issue. It got only 1,300 views.