BB Grey–musings

A Letter in the Spirit of Seneca

My friend,

You speak of freedom as the composer of your days—this is wisdom. But let us examine the score more closely. The blank page you cherish is ruled with invisible lines: the ledger’s demand, the body’s need for bread, the promises made when ambition outstripped the moon. These are not chains, but the fretboard upon which life’s melody finds its tension and release.

Consider:
When you built your enterprise, you traded one master for many. The client’s deadline, the supplier’s delay, the taxman’s calendar—these are the parameters that give form to your symphony. Without them, “whatever you want” becomes the tyranny of infinite choices, a cacophony of might-bes. The true artist knows constraint births creation. A sonnet’s fourteen lines liberate the poet more than formless babble ever could.

Yet here lies the paradox we sons of liberty must confront:
To be truly free, we must willingly bind ourselves—not to others’ expectations, but to rituals of our own design. Your morning pen on paper, the evening accounting of deeds—these are the sacred rites of a self-governed man. The world will forever intrude (that blundering ox of others’ fates!), but your power lies in the choosing: to meet chaos with habit, to answer noise with the measured cadence of your own making.

You long for the black-and-white café of legend, yet forget—Hemingway’s mornings were shackled to five hundred words before noon. The romance of freedom is built upon the rubble of discarded drafts. What you call “labor” is the chisel freeing the statue from the marble.

Today, this third day of April, 2025, I urge you to see:
Your mortgage is not a cage but the trellis supporting your vine. The telephone bill, a tether to the world you’ve claimed as your own. Even the interruptions are but dissonant notes awaiting your hand to resolve them into harmony.

Build your day as the cathedral builders did—stone by stone, rule by rule—that your liberty may rise skyward, anchored yet unshaken.

Yours in the pursuit of ordered freedom,
wilhelm