So much is shifting at once that I find it hard to know where to stand, let alone where to start. Gaps everywhere.
John Muir saw the difficulty more than a century ago, walking the Sierra:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, he wrote, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
Pull on one thread and the whole fabric moves.
So the task becomes simpler and more uncomfortable at the same time: pick a gap.
Any one will do. Find one that holds your attention, and from there work your way toward the one that matters now.
I have never found much to hold me in the gaps we make for ourselves. The gap in a market, in a strategy, or in the politics of the week; these are shallow things, drawn in data and coloured by opinion, and they close about as quickly as they open.
Nature keeps deeper examples, so I have gone back to a metaphor I have used previously, the gap that opens in a forest canopy when an old tree fails and falls, and to the under-storey beneath it, that patient tan…