Put like that—matter-of-factly, with the forward motion of enthusiastic, compound sentences—belies my actual experience. It has. been more. like; more like—this: Halting, hesitant, looping. I tend to be someone whose identity rests inordinately on the bundle of things that I do, not necessarily professions, but a group of practices that I stick with over time: I write postcards and letters; I make pies or bread or pasta; I carve designs into lino to print; I publish this little newsletter. So to consider whether the time for one of these is waning feels like a reconsideration of who I am. "I do this because this is what Jonathan does, and I am Jonathan" reconfigures (quite healthily) into "I am Jonathan. What does Jonathan do?" The faulty sense of a settled self is unsettled and openings appear for new predilections to emerge.
I do not often enter this state willingly. Earlier this year, a cascade of unwelcome endings, or threats thereof, appeared on the horizon. Dear friends moving away, family confronting being mortal, fellowship futures unrealized, the high of Homes for Living leveling out, a writing group going on an indefinite pause as member priorities shifted—each shook me. Unrelated as they were, I latched onto the metaphor of falling dominos, and we all know those are particularly satisfying as a lengthy string. At the risk of overstating its explanatory power, I think this image prompted me to look for, perhaps even to create, further endings to add to the chain. If these things were ending, why shouldn't others? Was the season of this newsletter over, for example?
My inclination was to clean house. That would, in one sense, be easy. Consolidate the endings, close-up shop rather than adapt and evolve. Fortunately, the wise counsel of many, including you, prevailed. Yes, some things would end. Others would take on new forms. But the sense of an ending did serve as a necessary prompt for me to consider a range of options that I had otherwise considered inexplicably impossible.
It gave new life to others. Your feedback on this newsletter via my (very scientific) survey was a nice shot in the arm to keep it going for now, with some tweaks in coming months (namely more shoutouts to Premier League champions Arsenal). In the meantime, please share it with your friends and family so we can approximate the recommendation ability of a Substack while avoiding the platform's enshitification.
In all my domino-ing, I was brought back to a musing that's swum in and out of view of late, probably originally something I gathered from
Oliver Burkeman's oeuvre: that a sense of stability can lead me to avoid taking risks that I think could unsettle that stability. The problem is, that sense of stability is often an illusion. So to avoid taking risks to preserve the status quo is a fool's errand that may actually undermine the future bedrock formed by new things oozing up through the inevitable, natural cracks in the surface.
Maybe some of the allure of working on books for me is the (mistaken) idea that they're season-less, or perhaps that they are primed, as a form, for reemergence. It's been so edifying to see how
Homes for Living rolls on. It was a joy to
trade thoughts with NY housing savant Oksana Mironova on prospects for social housing under the Mamdani administration in the
New York Review of Architecture, and I'm looking forward to speaking with community land trust practitioners from across the Northwest about some of the book's lessons in Sitka, Alaska come October. If you haven't
picked up a copy already, now and always is a great time, and if you're putting together a syllabus, give it a look for inclusion. Housing affordability and decommodification is unfortunately always in season. As for the World Cup's ending, ¡Vamos la Roja! ¡Viva Mikel Merino! ¡Keep
waving that flag, Lamine!
