While I See, I Write

A new perspective on perspective.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

In yesterday’s post, I discussed a prayer formula I used the night before to pray for a good night’s sleep (a prayer God answered):

1. Adoration

2. Reconciliation

3. Petition

The next morning, I prayed again. This prayer was prompted by concerns I was having at that moment about my vision.

The first sign of my cancer was a periodic visual phenomenon I’ve had every few days for several weeks: a spot in my visual field distorts in a pulsing manner. When I had my first and so far only seizure on July 31 it was preceded by a particularly bad episode of that. And the night after I received radiation treatment on my brain on August 29, I had another bad episode after which my vision was impaired for several days afterward.

My vision had recently recovered, but yesterday morning, something seemed vaguely off about it, which was making me anxious. In the past I might have just tried to ignore it and hope it would go away. But I realized that doing that would mean the worry would just gnaw at the fringes of my consciousness.

So instead I decided to pray on it.

Again, I began with adoration. I praised and thanked God for the glories of sight: for the human ability to see beauty, to read wisdom, and to formulate our thoughts in writing. I also thanked God for gifting me especially with (1) an aptitude for gleaning insights from my reading and (2) a way with words and ideas as a writer.

Then I confessed my failure to harness those gifts to the utmost of my ability.

I have read and absorbed the lessons of many books. I have channeled those lessons into many hundreds of essays, almost all of which I’m still proud of to this day. And I’ve had several long streaks of daily writing and publishing.

Yet, I know I could have written so much more. I have so much to share, such a knack for sharing it, and access to such great platforms for my writing. To honor these gifts, I ought to have been emulating my hero Henry Hazlitt by hammering out an article almost every single day all these years.

But I took my ability to see my writing unfold on a screen, and to reread and meticulously edit it, for granted. I did not fully appreciate how precious and precarious that gift was until I was afflicted with a metastasis in my visual cortex that, for several days, made it a challenge and a strain for me to read, especially on a screen, and that may at some point blind me altogether before killing me.

After forthrightly confessing this sin of omission to God and to myself, I was overcome with a yearning to do penance: to remedy and redeem it as best as I can.

I resolved, now that my vision is functioning normally for the time being, to write and publish every day that I still can. My current plan is to publish a daily essay here on Developing Devotion. (This is my third daily post: so far, so good.) This Substack has had a clear religious theme from the start. And I want to bring my Christian convictions, which have long implicitly underpinned my writing (even on economics and liberty), to the forefront going forward, because nothing is more important than, for however long I have in this body and world, using my intellectual and literary gifts to bring myself and others (especially other libertarians, to whom I can appeal the most) closer to God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

So penitent and so resolved, I was then ready to ask God for help: to heal my body and fortify my soul, to grant me the physical abilities and spiritual strength I need to serve Him and His children through prolific writing for decades to come.

By the time I finished this prayer, the vision issues I had been experiencing that morning had cleared up.

The late Will Grigg (another one of my heroes) used to sign off every blog essay and podcast episode with “Dum spiro, pugno,” Latin for “While I breathe, I fight” (a motto that Frédéric Bastiat could have justly adopted as well).

So I will end this essay with a similar pledge.

Dum video, scribo. While I see, I write.