Reflection

Dare I say, “Update”

Perhaps it’s useful to explain where Character is Destiny has been headed.

I recently exported everything I’d written for this project. What started as a last ditch effort to recover an old draft turned into something else.

I have around 63 published essays, and roughly 160 drafts. Peering through those old drafts, and this disparity between published and unpublished work, prompted some reflection. At first I kicked myself for leaving so many ends loose, but that’s superficial.

Many of those drafts weren’t meant to become essays, at least not yet. And, in any case, they served a purpose.

They still do.

Some of them followed an idea only far enough to expose a weak assumption, or an unearned conclusion. Others circled a question from half a dozen directions before disappearing quietly into a published piece later—their unkempt paths refined into something else. Many remain unfinished simply because what initially spurred them—questions or circumstances—aren’t finished with me.

The pear must ripen before escaping the branch, after all.

I’ve stopped thinking of them as abandoned things, though. To me, they represent the work beneath the work. Perhaps even a cave of sorts, suitable enough for occasional spelunking. Yet, looking across all those words—those published and not—I’ve reached the following understanding:

I’m writing this project from a different place than from where it began. There has been an evolution of sorts.

When Character is Destiny began, I thought I was trying to describe character. Those essays spoke to everything I knew how to say at the time. And all of it was flavored by various philosophies I have assembled into my personal worldview—dare I say developing Character Is Destiny’s philosophy—while only really using anecdote as a means of applying the anthropology to it.

Looking back—all these words later—I can see that almost every conclusion I attempted to reach became another beginning. Questions that once sought definitions come to me asking for sufficiency, and pondering their origin.

Is this inquiry enough?

Arguments I thought were finished keep returning to me at 2:00 AM, dissatisfied with their own foundations.

Have you considered every layer—and what about that one?

Every thread; every layer; every earned sentiment—they’re not done. The depths I thought I had already mapped revealed the hubris displayed ink had tried to settle.

The essays became less interested in describing virtue than in asking what grants any virtue its weight in the first place. While life has recently run its continuous challenges through me, I don’t think this realization happened all at once.

Maybe it’s just that I finally noticed the current beneath, and in a gradual sort of way.

I have always maintained that this space is less about certainty and more about pulling threads together with the reader. Arriving to questions and interrogating answers together, instead of working backwards from a conclusion.

This perspective expansion has interrupted my usual motivations. For the past couple of weeks, I have lived almost entirely inside a single essay. It will not leave me alone.

Thousands of words have come and gone because some carried me one layer deeper without earning the right to remain, and others arrived from the newly discovered current. Other days were spent revisiting essays I’d already published, only to realize they’d been reaching toward questions I hadn’t yet learned how to ask.

And so the draft pile continues to fatten, the posting rhythm goes out of wack, and the forge sparks.

I’ve stopped measuring progress by pages written, word count achieved, or how neatly wrapped the philosophy is. Most of the ideas require excavation—and not because they don’t deliver something substantive.

They just don’t descend enough into the depths to join the published things.

That said, Worthy Ends will be the next essay published here.

It feels like the first piece I’ve written after recognizing what this project has quietly become. It resists closing an argument and asks questions that seem more fundamental than ones prior.

I find myself increasingly less concerned with arriving at conclusions than with understanding what those conclusions rest upon. Every answer seems to carry another question beneath it. Every question usually spawns another.

And, every principle demands an account of itself.

If this project has changed, I don’t think it’s because I’ve found better answers.

I think I’ve become more careful about deciding which questions deserve to remain alive.

Everything that follows will be an attempt to keep asking them, and to honor the current.