There is something I've been wanting to do for a little while.
The Friday edition of The Long View Letter has settled into a rhythm that I rather enjoy. Each week I try to step back from the clamour of events, look for the longer patterns, and offer a perspective that may still be worth reading a year or two from now. Those letters are carefully considered. I think about them for quite a long time before they find their way onto the page.
But thinking doesn't stop on a Friday. In fact, most of the interesting thoughts arrive during the week, while I'm making coffee, walking somewhere, talking in the kitchen, working in the hospital, reading a book that sends me off in an unexpected direction, or listening to someone tell me about their life.
They are the thoughts that don't quite fit into a polished essay. So I wondered whether you might enjoy receiving them. Not every observation deserves a grand conclusion. Sometimes it is enough simply to notice something together.
I found myself doing exactly that a few days ago.
I was sitting in the canteen, watching people as I waited for someone to arrive. Almost every person who came through the door paused before sitting down. Out came a phone. A quick glance at messages. Another at the news. A little scroll through whatever the algorithm had decided was important that morning.
Nobody looked particularly happy about it. Neither did they look surprised.
It struck me that we have become extraordinarily good at filling the smallest spaces in our lives. Waiting has almost disappeared. So has boredom. And perhaps, quietly, so has some of the thinking that only happens when nothing much is demanding our attention.
As a doctor, I've often noticed that important insights don't usually arrive while someone is talking. They appear a few moments later, after the conversation has slowed and there is enough silence for a different thought to emerge.
Life may work rather like that. Perhaps wisdom needs a little empty space in which to appear. Modern life seems to regard every empty moment as a problem to be solved. I wonder whether it is actually a resource to be protected.
I don't know the answer, but I suspect that it is.
I've become very suspicious of “gurus” who always seem to have answers. I now prefer to read material which has the capacity to change the way I think. The older I become, the more I find myself asking new questions. Questions such as: What is really going on here? What might I be missing? How would this look if I viewed it over twenty years instead of twenty minutes?
Those questions have served me better than illusory certainty ever did.
So this Tuesday letter will be different from the Friday one.
It will be a little more personal. A little more experimental. Sometimes I'll tell you about a conversation I've had, a book that has made me stop and think, a patient who has taught me something (with identities, of course, protected), a memory from my years in medicine, or simply something someone has said over supper that has stayed with me.
Occasionally I may become quietly irritated by something happening in the wider world. If I do, I hope my concern will be directed less towards blaming people and more towards asking how we might preserve the qualities that allow societies to flourish. I find myself becoming increasingly committed to those quiet virtues that rarely make the headlines: curiosity, restraint, hospitality, responsibility, kindness and courage.
Perhaps that is one of the privileges of growing older. We become less interested in winning arguments and more interested in understanding what keeps civilisation intact.
I don't expect to have the last word on any of this. In fact, I'd rather this became something of a conversation.
So let me leave you with a question.
What have you noticed recently that most people seem to be walking straight past?
Not something dramatic. Just something quietly important.
I have a feeling that the future will be shaped less by those who shout the loudest than by those who continue noticing what really matters.
Until Friday then… and then next Tuesday.
