I almost didn’t go. When you’re feeling unmoored, it’s hard to believe that a lecture will save you from your unbidden thoughts. Yet, Mike Taibbi’s talk tonight not only comforted me, it inspired me to write again- something I haven’t been able to do in more than a year.
The room listened to him, rapt. I had images of his name in the “Today Show” rundown from when I worked there. His name always in the 7 am hour- the serious hour. This is one of the greats. In this chaste interior, we were among someone so luminous; he talked to us without a vestige of career regret because he put effort into every story.
He gave me a print copy of “Straight Ahead”, which recounts his 1500-mile sailing trip taken a few days after leaving NBC. Over that ocean salt, he thought of a very sweet line about retirement: “And here, and how, and to what end, will I find that fervor now?”. Fervor is a word that I must remember.
Because before the jangled nerves, before the risky move to Hawaii, before the finance career, before learning how to swim, before the convertible, before the pills, before dumping the pills, before rising in love, before falling out of love…before it all, there was simply fervor.
