Observation

I’ve become incredibly opinionated in these middle years, and I’m less afraid than ever about letting that be known.

I suspect it’s going to lose me some more friends, as it already has.

I’m torn: I’ve always been good at diplomacy, but it seems less useful to me these days. I don’t want to be known entirely as a grouch or a curmudgeon, but I also know that that role has value in a community.

The older I get, the more I think of myself as being on some “heyoka” path — the cursed and necessary being whose skewed vision is crucial to the understanding of the un-skewed vision; the exception that proves (in its original sense of “tests”) the rule.

Hubris? Maybe. Maybe; perhaps probably. I find myself less and less interested in how I am seen and thought of. I can only do what I do.