"Balance"

Apropos of nothing, I want to share a line I came across in Anna Karenina, because it creates such a beautiful image: “...and the conversation began to crackle merrily, like a blazing bonfire.” Is it any wonder that Tolstoy ranks among the best writers of fiction?

 

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In case you are wondering (though I am sure you are not), that is not me in the photo hand-standing on the chair. Nor is that me with a cigarette.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Balance”

October 4, 2025

 

“life is a balance between holding on and letting go.”

                                                                                                                                Attributed

                                                                                                                                Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

                                                                                                                                13^th Century Persian Sufi mystic

 

“Don’t fall!” Those words are heard every day by older people. And for good reason. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), falls are the leading cause of injury, and deaths from injury, among adults over 65. Balance is critical. At Essex Meadows there are a dozen exercise classes, all with the goal of improving balance. 

 

In law, balance is symbolized by Lady Justice – the rights of the accused weighed against the rights of society. For most, balance extends beyond the physical, to work, the mind and the soul. Over the past few years there has been an emphasis on life-work-balance, a revival, if you will, of the 17^th Century proverb: “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” However, to some there is worry that young people are less interested in hard work. The “Pepper...And Salt” cartoon in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (drawn by Tobias Schülert) addressed that concern. It depicted an older man behind a desk, speaking to a younger man seated before him: “It turns out that your great work-life balance is not that great for our company.”

 

But to blame the young is unfair. One has only to look at self-made young billionaires like Scale AI founders Alexander Wang (28) and Lucy Guo (30) and cryptocurrency pioneer Ed Craven (29), sports stars like Simone Biles (28) and Carlos Alcarez (22), or Taylor Swift (35). These people are singularly focused – interested in realizing the fruit of their talents.  None adhere to the maxim that each day should be divided equally between eight hours of work, eight hours of family and fun, and eight hours of sleep.

 

But for the majority, a happy life entails weighing financial needs against the love of family, the desires of our intellect, and the needs of our soul. Human Resource people speak of the “four pillars” of work-life balance: mental, physical, social, and financial, but no two people find happiness in the same way. With all due respect to Leo Tolstoy, not all happy families are alike. Instinctively we seek balance in our lives. We know we need breaks from work – the love that comes from family, food for the soul, challenges to our intellect, and the companionship of friends.

 

Life is a marathon, not a sprint, so options should be kept open; for the future is over the next rise, where the road disappears into the mist. The last few miles of one’s life should be run (or walked) with the same enthusiasm as the start. To do that, a personally-tailored life-balance is important. Thomas Edison is quoted: “Time is the only capital that any human has, and the only thing he can’t afford to lose.” So, weigh your choices. Take sensible risks. Be not afraid to fail. Question. Love. And when opportunity comes, grab it.

 

As for me, my family comes first. I revel in friends, read books, worry about financial markets, think of God, and devote some time to writing these silly essays. But I take my ski pole when walking through the woods and fields.

"Diplomacy, Or Telling it Like it is?"

 It is October 1^st, and the government has shut down. It makes one yearn for term limits, with an elected government that really has the people’s interests.

 

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Not apropos of today’s topic, this article by Roger Lowenstein, financial journalist and author, which appeared in Monday’s WSJ, “How – and Why – U.S. Capitalism is Unlike Any Other,” should be read by everyone interested in why the United States is unique in the annals of nations.

 

https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-capitalism-differences-eaecd208?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1

 

 

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As for today’s subject, America’s politics over their 250 years have given us a long list of unique personages. While obviously liked by their Parties, all had political opponents. But collectively they served our nation well. No one Party has had a lock on national politics. Domination of the Executive branch has changed almost equally since the end of World War II. Leadership in Congress has also changed, and because the Executive and legislative branch have changed, so has the Judicial branch. Mr. Trump, to put it politely, has been controversial. But who among us would say that controversy cannot be for the good? Western Europe was shocked by Mr. Trump’s recent speech. You may well disagree with his language, tone and even his message, but I felt, regardless of the language, it was the medicine needed. 

 

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As for the two attached photos –  one I took with my iPhone at the end of August of the moon rising over Mud Swamp in Essex. The other is of a painting, inspired by my photo, done by a good friend and fellow resident here at Essex Meadows,

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Diplomacy, Or Telling it Like it is?”

October 1, 2025

 

“Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions.”

                                                                                                                Iain Pears (1955-)

                                                                                                                British art historian and novelist

                                                                                                                The Dream of Scipio, 2002

 

“Your countries are going to hell,” said President Donald Trump to the UN on September 23. “...you want to be politically correct and you are destroying your heritage.” While he was speaking to the General Assembly, his words were aimed at long-time allies in Western Europe. Post-war Presidents have prided themselves on their diplomacy. Even President Reagan, while demanding that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” did so without a hint of acrimony in his voice. While I suspect Mr. Trump has never read H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices: First Series, he, nevertheless, followed his admonition: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

 

Diplomacy is the art of having people understand and accept your position. In the halls of government power, words are usually best understood when backed by strength. President Theodore Roosvelt advised American Presidents to “...speak softly and carry a big stick.” Will Rogers, American humorist and social commentator, put it differently: “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” The American journalist and author Isaac Goldberg wrote in 1927 that diplomacy is the art “to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.” At times it is more diplomatic to leave certain things unsaid. Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said: diplomacy, “is the art of restraining power.” In the end it is the ability to get people to see and do things your way.  

 

Donald Trump, for all his qualities, is not a diplomat.[1] To his acolytes that makes him a hero. On the other hand his bluntness and coarseness can be off-putting. He went beyond just Europe when he asked what the more delicate would have hesitated to ask: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” According to its Mission Statement, its core mission is to “Maintain Peace and Security – to prevent and remove threats to peace and to suppress acts of aggression through peaceful and just means.” Forty years ago Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN, condemned the UN for the “bizarre reversal” of its founding intent to resolve conflicts. Has there been an improvement in the last four decades? In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, In February 2022, Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants slew 1,200 Israelis. Sudan’s civil war (April 2023-present) has killed 150,000 and displaced an estimated 14 million, in a country of under 50 million. Today, what in different circumstances would seem black humor, the military junta that governs Sudan is a member of the UN’s Human Rights Council. Amazing! Why are critics of Israel, including the UN, silent on Sudan?

 

In his attack on Western governments, President Trump, in his immutable way, focused on what he called a double-tailed monster: “Immigration and the high cost of so-called green energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. Both immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe.” 

 

Selective immigration and satisfying rising energy demands without depleting resources are critical to the survival of any nation that wants to be prosperous and remain free. But Europe has hewed far to the Left: open borders and demanding that all energy consumption comes from renewables within an unrealistic timeframe. They have gone beyond those two factors. Growth and the freedom that comes with a dynamic economy, have been hampered by an aging population, an unaffordable welfare system, and an emphasis on social justice and identity politics, where equal outcomes score higher than equal opportunities. One consequence is that individual creativity is curbed. They have impeded free speech by calling oppositional speech hateful. All of the above have limited GDP output and increased national debt.

 

In its February 2024 report, Freedom House noted that, while Europe remains the most-free region in the world, 14 European countries received score declines, while 6 saw score improvements. Globally, freedom declined for the 19^th year in a row. Where has the UN been? Economic growth in Europe has been hampered by expanding entitlement benefits, an aging population, and shrinking population growth. Since 1960, the TFR (total fertility rate) in Europe has been halved, while the average age has increased by eleven years to 42.8, despite a growing influx of younger Muslims. According to the World Bank, GDP growth, from 2008 to 2023, in the European Union expanded 13.%, from $16.37 trillion to $18.59 trillion. During those same fifteen years, GDP growth in the U.S. rose 87 percent, from $14.77 trillion to $27.72 trillion. A course correction in Europe is needed.

 

So, was President Trump correct in telling Europe that their countries are “going to hell?” Europe was home to the expansion of Christianity and to the Judeo-Christian heritage that produced some of the world’s greatest art, music and literature; it was the origin of the Enlightenment, of basic human rights like free speech; it was where free-market capitalism was first defined and first practiced; Europe was where many of the democratic institutions we enjoy today were founded. To forgo that heritage and history, those achievements and values, to which all Europeans are fortunate to be heirs, would be shameful.

 

President Trump is often coarse in speech and arrogant and churlish in behavior. In his search for the “art of the deal,” hyperbole has always been a well-used instrument in his elocution toolbox, with tact often absent. But he is not alone in pointing the finger at Europe. Writing in the September 26, 2025 edition of The European Conservative, Sven Larson wrote: “Europe is drifting into disintegration and demise.” In his speech, Mr. Trump also spoke of his love for Europe and its people: “I love Europe. I love the people of Europe.” Europe, especially European leaders, needed to hear his tough words. While Mr. Trump might have employed a more diplomatic tone, it is hard to disagree with his diagnosis.  

 

The irony is that Donald Trump might understand better than his elitist, and often hypocritical, critics what was meant by Iain Pears in the quote that heads this essay.

 

 

 

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[1] Having written that, I could be proven wrong. If Mr. Trump is able to convince Europe to up its game against Russia in Ukraine, and is able to gain a peace between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as now look possible, he will have given diplomacy a new lease on life. In fact, Walter Russell Mead wrote on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, that if Mr. Trump is successful with these two endeavors: “If diplomacy were ballet, Mr. Trump would be a Nijinsky.”

"The Undiscovered Country," Paul Andrew Hutton

 I found it instructive, after I had finished the book, to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s nine page essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History:” 

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Undiscovered Country, Paul Andrew Hutton

September 27, 2025

 

“ ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance

of American settlement westward, explain American development,’ he boldly declared.” 

                                                                                                Paul Andrew Hutton

                                                                                                The Undiscovered Country

                                                                                                Quoting Professor Frederick Jackson Turner 

 

Paul Andrew Hutton provides a sweeping history of the American story, as people moved east to west – from British General Edward Braddocks defeat in 1755 in the Battle of the Monongahela, in Pennsylvania, to the murder of Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the subsequent Wounded Knee massacre on Porcupine Creek in South Dakota in 1890 when U.S. Army troops killed about 300 Lakota Indians.  

 

During those 135 years, the European population in what became the United States rose from roughly 1.4 million to 63 million. By the early-mid 18^th Century the Native American population had already been decimated by disease and battle, both brought by Europeans over the previous two hundred years. It is estimated that their populations had declined to about 3 million from over 10 million. 

 

The reader is introduced (or re-introduced to those of us who read stories of the west in our youth), to Indian Chiefs Red Eagle, Tecumseh, Mangas Colorados, his son-in-law Cochise, Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as to frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, John Frémont, Annie Oakley and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. We read of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the War for American Independence, the War of 1812, the Alamo in 1836, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the American Civil War, and innumerable wars against American Indians. We travel to western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and into Kentucky on the Wilderness Road. We climb over the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee, and across the western reaches of the country on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, and we witness the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. 

 

Hutton subtitles the book “Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West.” The tragedy in the story is that these lands were “rightfully owned and still controlled by a host of Native nations.” However, the relentless emigration of Europeans kept pushing the frontier west. The results were thousands of individual tragedies, the enslavement, massacres and mutilation of Native Indians, as well as of the men, women and children who chose the open spaces – and assumed the risk – the frontier offered.

 

Mr. Hutton tempers those who revere western heroes and tones down those who condemn them. He writes of events, letting the reader draw his or her judgements. The history of mankind is one of war, of conquest and subjugation, of the rise and fall of civilizations. And there are no Queensbury Rules in war or battle, which is always brutal and unfair to the innocent. Certainly, there were none on the American frontier.

 

Professor Hutton is the heir to Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), best known for his collection of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920), which includes the seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He argued it was the availability of an undeveloped frontier that shaped American democracy and character. Hutton’s story tells of how uncovering that “undiscovered country,” through triumph and tragedy, pushed the frontier west and helped establish a great nation.