Upcoming Conversations
Insights about place, creativity and meaningful work – and not from me!
Hello folks. Right now I’m lining up a series of Q&As that will feature here as part of Ways of Life. This has been in the pipeline for some time, so it’s good to finally let the project see daylight.
I’ll be exchanging ideas with original thinkers who…
Create work that conveys a sense of place (either their own locality, or the places they travel to).
Value reserving time for slow living, deep work, real-life conversation and non-scalable procedure.
Express opinions derived from a broad and/or rare experience of the world.
Are open to nuance and contradiction, and able to say “I don’t know”.
Have a healthy(ish) relationship with social media, exhibiting restraint when expressing themselves online.
Some of these people will be fellow Substackers. Some not.
We’ll be focusing on the knotty problems of life. Values, purpose and meaning… the kinds of questions that most of us rarely ask each other, and are unused to answering.
So do stick around, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. Although I’ve dabbled with paywalls this year, these conversations will be free to read.
Can introverts interview people?
Short answer: yes, of course we bloody can. In fact, maybe we make better interviewers.
I’m rubbish at banter; party atmosphere exhausts me (classic introvert). But I do like getting to know people. It took a few years to realise.
When I landed a dream job writing for a Land Rover magazine back in 2013, I found myself regularly interviewing folks from all walks of life. (On the whole, story-worthy vehicles are owned by story-worthy people.) From JLR engineers to rural blacksmiths, international expeditioners to casual ‘weekend warriors’, maverick motorsport demons to backwater workshop wizards, luxury-loving spendaholics to cash-strapped students and pensioners. That’s one of the appealing things about Land Rovers – they’re such a broad church.
And in these conversations, the same thing would always happen. There’d come a point where the story about the person’s vehicle would run out of intrigue, and fluffier angles of attack would start pinging into my mind. Because when you exhaust all the “who, what, when and how” questions, you’re left with the more interesting one, which people don’t always know how to answer. Why?
This isn’t a Land Rover thing
How we spend our resources is rarely as interesting as our underlying motivations for doing so. Someone’s involvement in Land Rovers, or any other of life’s pursuit, is downstream of more fundamental, fuzzier things.
In slightly later life, as a freelance motoring writer, I interviewed a lifelong bricklayer who’d spent decades restoring he most immaculate Ford Escort RS2000 you’ve ever seen. (As soon as I got behind the wheel, the oil pump munched itself to bits, prompting the owner to merrily dismember the entire engine on his kitchen table.) Then there was the electrician who restored an E-type Jag as a bonding exercise with his ailing father. And the lorry technician who brought so much energy into each day that he worked his way up to managing a DAF dealership, spending his evenings building the workshop of his dreams and then, with the help of his son, restoring obnoxiously rapid Vauxhalls inside it. And the extraordinarily wizened old gent whose 110-year-old Morris had had only one previous owner before him: his dad. (When I met him, that car was puffing across East Anglia carrying at least three generations of the same family.)
All of these people were proper salt-of-the-earth human beings, whose cars were windows into the depths of their humanity.
I digress, slightly. My point is that we each have wildly different ways of expressing our almost universal care for the world. The way we show up – building, nurturing, exploring and developing expertise – is the product of the best parts of us (however broken we may be inside). And that will never cease to be interesting, and valuable to witness and understand.
Place and creativity
I don’t write car stories on Substack. Instead, I want to use this platform to explore the influence of place, landscape and heritage in shaping our work and creativity. It’s relevant to the broadly travel-themed project that I’ve been experimenting with here over the last couple of years.
The places where we choose to build our lives, and the journeys we make from them, become fundamental to our lifelong projects of self-understanding. And in our efforts to make the world a better place, every glimmer of understanding can go a long way.
Travel, and writing, have always inspired me, but I’ve increasingly come to question what travel writing actually is. Although it’s many things to many people, I think that travel writing, at its heart – when it’s not distracted by the gizmos and aesthetics of travel (the materialistic stuff which is fun and engaging but ultimately shallow) – is essentially place writing. (Let’s debate this another time.) There’s meaning to be found in investigating the stories and relationships that give a place its character. No place is devoid of emotional salience, and the profundity of that experience is deepened by the strength and interconnectedness of the memories associated with it.
By unearthing these connections in each other, we deepen our rootedness in this planet and this life. I believe that doing so may foster understanding, and help each of us through the journey of existence.
Cheesy, I know. Naive? Maybe. Uplifting though, hopefully.
Alone together
Writing is a solitary pursuit, but it shouldn’t be a lonely one.
On Substack I sometimes devote too many words to the detritus floating around inside my own skull (see above). And as I lack the ‘strength of brain’ for this sort of amateur philosophising to be particularly useful to anyone, it’d be vanity to attribute lasting meaning to it.
There’s a balance to be found between writing about the inner and the outer worlds, and it’s an important one to strike if we want our words to be relevant, personal and unreplicable.
For anyone becoming too solipsistic in their creativity, the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson had these words of advice:
“If you would learn to write, ’tis in the street that you must learn it […] Solitude is impracticable and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society & Solitude (1870).1
He was right. Solitude is a precious commodity but too much of it will make the best of us mad and stupid. Ideas developed in isolation are rarely fully formed; collaboration is healthy, perhaps even vital. And so, partly in defence of my own sanity, it’s time to start inviting some other voices into Ways of Life.
Now you know the vaguely optimistic jumble that’s been wobbling around my skull. If that sizzles your bacon, stand by – thought-provoking perspectives from bloody interesting human beings from all walks of life, coming up.
Note that I’ve created a new section for these posts, called ‘Conversations’, which you can subscribe/unsubscribe to separately from my other writing if you wish.
These posts will come as a trickle rather than a barrage – a cadence that I hope can be sustainable for me as well as you. Ultimately I’d love to move this into the realm of podcasting, but for now [insert crap excuse here].
As you’re still reading, you seem to have an appetite for this, so you might like my earlier post about conversation, and the places it can lead us… 👇
Like what I’m doing here? Here’s how you can send me a tiny tip and earn my undying adoration, without committing to an annual subscription. 🙏
From his collection of lectures published in 1870 as ‘Society and Solitude’. The collection also contains some absolute corkers that are best ignored, e.g. “Wherever snow falls, there is usually civil freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and pampered at the cost of higher qualities; the man is sensual and cruel.” Yikes!