This post is a kind of follow-up to What I Learned (2003-10). It’s also the background for the next few posts, in which I’ll be asking for help with seven things I’m working on right now. Whether or not you’re able to help directly, I hope it will be an interesting experiment.

Last week, my friend Cassie posted on Facebook, “Is it wrong or weird to say I feel very happy today?”

It was the rather gloomy French playwright Henry de Montherlant who insisted that “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” For many of us, it may be truer to say we are less accustomed to name our happiness than our other emotions. (My mum says she once asked my dad how she would know if he was happy. “How would I know if I was happy?” he replied.)

So, in a spirit of appreciative enquiry, and following Cassie’s example, I want to say that there hasn’t been a day now in some time on which I haven’t stopped for a moment to reflect on how happy (and lucky) I feel with my life. Last week, as I was working on the new issue of Dark Mountain from my laptop in a beautiful art deco café in Brussels, I suddenly remembered being twenty-one and announcing to a friend at university that I had worked out what I wanted to do when I grew up. “I’m going to start a magazine which I can edit from a cafe in any city in the world!” Judging by her expression, this sounded like just the kind of unrealistic dream that showed I was not in danger of growing up any time soon; but ten years after we graduated, I seem to have stumbled into the life that I was looking for.

I sometimes talk about the virtue of walking backwards. It’s an idea I got from Keith Johnstone’s writings on improvisation, which have taught me a great deal about how to live well. It is also - as I talk about in Remember the Future? - an idea that has deep mythic roots: Prometheus, the man who steals fire from the gods, is named ‘forethought’, in the sense of ‘foresight’; he has a brother, less remembered, Epimetheus, whose name means ‘afterthought’ or ‘hindsight’, the fool who walks backwards, and who accepts the gift of Pandora from the gods, and with her the famous jar that brought all the evils of mankind into the world. (That ‘Pandora’ means ‘all-giver’ may hint at an older, less misogynistic version of the story.) In modernity, for which Prometheus was an iconic figure, the classic version of Epimetheus is surely Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, blown backwards on the wind of time, always able to see what is broken but unable to do anything about it. In the closing chapter of Deschooling Society, however, Ivan Illich proposed a retelling in which the tragedy of Epimetheus becomes a hopeful prophecy, a reintegration of past and future.

I often talk about my “career” as something that has happened to me by accident. This is not a conceit: the best way I can describe how I ended up doing all this stuff is that I have been walking backwards, frequently lost in reflection on my own past and the vast collective past into which it disappears, never knowing where I would find myself next. Lately, I have had a sense that this process of walking backwards is beginning to bring something into view: a shape connecting the breadth of interests which might for a while have looked (and felt) as though I were spreading myself too thin. Andrew Taggart wrote a very generous blog post recently, in which he talked about his impressions of my work, describing me as a ‘Neoplatonist’ living by ‘the principle of plenitude’:

When you look at his website, you’re immediately struck by the range and diversity of his projects, plans, and ideas. At first blush, the experience is rather overwhelming. And yet you soon realize that his life is not a cabinet of curiosities or a hoarder’s dingy apartment. You finally see that it’s governed by a novel understanding of education, public spiritedness, and friendship, all of which are expressed in a near-infinite plurality of projects, start-ups, institutions, and ideas.

The coherence which Andrew seems to see in my work is something that I recognise intuitively, but is only coming into focus as I begin to gain some steadiness in my life, after two years that have felt like some kind of epic luge ride. The chance to escape to Brussels for ten days a month is giving me some of that balance I’ve been looking for, the schole whose importance I’ve written about more often than practiced. (If I were two hours' train journey from London in England, people would still treat me as being on call; there, I can hide behind the conceptual fog which falls over the Channel. I am Abroad and get left alone.) Among other things, it offers the stillness in which to recognise some of the costs of that luge-like existence: those friendships which I didn’t look after well enough, those places where the rough edges of projects did damage which deserves more acknowledgement than I gave. These are things I want to attend to, where I can.

Meanwhile, I am deeply excited about the projects and possibilities opening ahead of me, but if I am going to do the best I can with them, I need your help. Maybe not you specifically, but someone you know, or someone one of us knows. I’ve been riding the amazing networks which something as simple as Twitter makes possible for long enough that I’ve got a lot of faith these days in its ability to help us solve each other’s problems - in fact, I can’t imagine how different my life would be right now without all the help I’ve received in this way from so many people over the past two years.

So, as I walk backwards into the next stage of this thing I’d hardly call a “career”, I will be making a series of posts asking for your help in the projects I’m working on or have responsibilities for. Maybe you’ll be able to help with one of them, maybe you won’t, and maybe help will come in a form or from a direction completely other to what I thought I was asking for.

Whatever else, I hope I’ll be able to share some stories about my work that make interesting reading in their own right - and I’ll be sure to follow up and tell you what comes out of this experiment.