The Wisdom of Recklessness

A brief winter letter

Winter for me is always for remembering. Remembering, and then re-telling, reweaving old stories in a new way, seeing everything again in a different, dawning light.

Last week, I devoted several days to doing extensive accounting for the publisher I’ve been running for almost the last ten years. Ten’s a good number to account for, though I know its only thanks to the Romans that ten and its multiples have any sense to us. They’re why we care about decades, and measure social forces in such divisions. Arbitrary, really, but so are all other enumerations.

Accounting for all the books I helped bring into the world — 40, four tens, including a book that no longer exists — over that singular decade of my life was fascinating, since I remember what else happened in my life, where I was, and how I felt when they were being published. There are stories there, forty of them, each interesting enough to tell to those who’d might listen. Like the one I edited in a cramped house in Dublin, waiting out a Schengen visa reset, the work taking longer and longer for no explicable reason I could think of until, while threading a needle to repair a button, I finally noticed my eyesight was failing. Or the one I edited over very late nights and into many pre-dawn mornings, in a similarly cramped living room, in the only space and during the only time I had enough quiet to work, my techno-obsessed and drug-addled housemates finally asleep. Or the one I worked on in Berlin, staying in a friend’s apartment for eight weeks while she was on vacation elsewhere. I remember one evening watching a brilliant lightning storm from the window next to the table at which I worked, closing the laptop, and then wandering through the sensuously humid and electric air the rest of the evening, feeling held in the arms of the world.

I’ve been writing a letter to an old friend, and it’s been going really, really slow. I’ve made several starts, then become so frustrated with how poorly I seem to tell any of my stories, and then I stop for weeks. We’ve not seen each other for about a decade, and had only seen each other once the previous one. Those meetings were strained, neither of us really certain how to explain ourselves to each other but desperately needing to. I wrote him a letter earlier last summer, and he wrote me one back in autumn, and it’s winter and my turn.

Winter’s for remembering, and retelling, and such things don’t come so easily sometimes. Especially, I find myself often oddly embarrassed by the blind hope, the reckless abandon, and the foolish optimism by which all the best things in my life have come about. I’m where I am because of such indefensible ideas and habits, and that’s the only proof I can offer as justification for the wisdom of impracticality.

In my current attempt at writing to him, I wrote of finding myself living in a storage garage in France when I first moved to Europe, since previous plans did not manifest as they’d seemed they would. I’d been homeless before, though, three months in Seattle when I first moved there, too. Neither time did I ever actually think of myself as homeless, nor did I ever feel scared. I’d been reckless, and foolish, and utterly impractical, but nevertheless quite certain that’s just how you need to do certain things, how you get from one place to another.

As another friend and I describe such things, it’s like throwing your rucksack to the other side of a dangerously swollen river because you want to get across and need a way to force yourself to do so.

My first name is the Welsh word for “river crossing” or “ford.” When talking with native German speakers, they sometimes laugh when they learn my last name. Especially those in the south-west of Germany, familiar with the Schwäbisch dialect, think it’s quite amusing. Literally translated, it’s “wild spirit or courage” but, more accurately, “recklessly bold.” From what I’ve read, it was a kind of nickname given to the sorts of men who’d rush out into dangerous battle against superior foes — not out bravery or of duty, but rather just because they didn’t bother to find out how many they were actually up against — and somehow survive anyway.

It fits, and my reckless abandon has served me quite well, so I’m unsure why I’m so embarrassed by it sometimes. Perhaps it’s only because such embarrassment is only possible when remembering: hindsight reveals what boldness didn’t bother to find out before the moment of decision.

Better not to have known how heedless I was being, since I’m actually not very brave at all. In fact, I’m quite a coward when I actually know what I’m getting into, and would never have done most of the things I’ve done if I’d “known better.”

Best that I didn’t know. Best to have been reckless, otherwise I’d might never have done anything at all.

Brief notes:

I’m offering a course on my book Being Pagan again, and it starts 10 March, 2024. All the information for enrollment is at this link, and if you are a founding-level supporter of this substack, you can enroll for free (send me a email to set this up).

Also, if you’re interested in joining my weekly Black Elephant parades, I’d love to have you! They’re currently every Sunday at 6pm Central European Time (Paris/Luxembourg), which is 5pm London time, noon for east-coast US folks, and 9 am for west-coast folks. To sign up, go to this link, or send me an email (reply to the email version of this post).