As I look over the essays and posts I have written this year, I warily eye the subject matter that appears on this site. I shouldn’t be, I’ve written all of them myself, just as I have been doing for going on 20 years now. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, tapped out, so to speak.
In essence, the short answer is yes. I’ve done a bunch of stuff here on the wine trail in Italy. And it has become a repository of images, ideas, and notions that I find myself referring back to more often than I ever imagined I would be doing. So, it has achieved the goal of being a web-log, for my purposes.
As to if it still holds any interest to the thousands of reader who happen upon this site weekly, well that is another question for another day.
David Brooks wrote this column in the New York Times recently, Be Careful About What You Want, in which he ruminates over these five struggles:
- The struggle between craft and reward
- The struggle between gift love and need love
- The struggle between excellence and superiority
- The struggle between high and low desires
- The struggle between ambition and aspiration
Reading and observing over these almost 20 years (in five months) regarding the wine trade where I worked for 40, those struggles resonate. Not just in work-time but in living a full life. Now that I have the time and luxury of reflection, they impart an urgency that grabs me and shakes me and interrogates me and accuses me.
And I ask this question: Haven’t we been here before?