Moral Patchworks
Where I reflect on delays, share a major piece I wrote, and announce a project for the year.
This Substack has been a little slower to restart than I anticipated. In 2025, I committed to practicing stoic virtues systematically, one per week in turn, and share my experience in writing. In 2026, I will not disconnect from the practice of virtue, and want to continue sharing regular moral fragments, but neither did I commit to any structure. Where to from there? Failure of wisdom: I omitted the design work to figure out next steps.
In addition, I got absorbed by a piece in the first weeks of the year. Before the literary magazine Meanjin was shut down, its last editor Esther Anatolitis commissioned an essay from me, exploring virtue ethics as a potential way to resist polarisation. Melbourne University Press honoured those commissions, and released Against Tragedy in digital version – you can read it here. I’m very happy with the final version, but it took a toll to get there!
I wrote here that literary journals offer a focal point and institutional validation, to keep writers going a little while longer against the odds. Commissions are a jolt of energy to crystallise thought and a reminder that the work matters. Launches are moment for more public recognition. Payment is a reminder that the work has value. All this keeps our mental world more fertile. Digital release did not give me quite the same oomph.
Besides, I was going to delay design work on this substack by writing a series of Week 14 posts capturing the gist of my learnings for each virtue. Then I realised, much of it is distilled in my latest Meanjin essay. Seriously, you should read it :-).
So, I will embrace a measure of emergence. To begin the year, I will share a series of lingering reflections from last year. Every day, I would take notes in a paper journal: one per virtue. Then I would type up those notes, and compose posts from there. Some sequences did not quite fit, but similar themes kept reappearing and weaving themselves together. Often, blending reflections arising from the practice of different virtues together. I put them into shape, and made a series of nine patchworks.
This will be the first phase of the year then – in line with the title of this substack – nine moral patchworks from 2025.