In a couple of hours, 2021 will come to the Eastern time zone in USA where I write this. A few hours after that, Jupiter will pass exactly opposite my natal Mercury position. It’s a good time for me to consider whether my plans and efforts have been grand enough.

A few days ago I heard a re-broadcast of Patrick Stewart’s Fresh Air interview with Sam Briger, who said to him: “You’ve said that when you first started, when you first started acting, your performances were cautious and that you didn’t want to expose yourself too much. What do you mean by that?” Stewart, then aged 79, said this:

I was told about it by my — the director of my acting school. I went to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. And towards the end of my two years there, he called me into his office and gave me a pretty tough talking to. But the last thing he said to me was, Patrick, you will never achieve success by insuring against failure. And I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn’t — not for years and years and years. And I learned that you have to take risks. You have to be brave. You have to step into the unknown. You have to jump off the edge of the cliff. All of those things are required of actors. Once I’d finally understood that, I knew what direction I had to go in.

Though I sense where I need to go, I continually shut myself down with judgment. Stewart addressed this too:

I’m braver than I was when I was 35. I am not averse to risk-taking. And I don’t judge myself. I used to do that so much. Ah, Patrick, that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. You could’ve done that differently. You could’ve done it better. That gets in the way of spontaneity and real feeling coming into something.

I set up this website as a conduit for whatever I might wish to do with it. At a minimum I had in mind business and a means of exchanging information with clients, but also a broad range of expression both more personal and more expansive.

In the fifteen years since I registered this domain, I timidly posted a few items, took them down, fiddled with blogging engines, and maintained some files out of public view for use by myself and a few friends and clients (but mostly myself). In recent years, however, I fought the urge to withdraw posts, and that counts for something. It’s not grand but it’s something.

I like grand. Grand will be good, don’t you think?