Today is the 21st anniversary of the founding of the Slope of Hope. For the past 7,670 days, without fail, I have been writing in this space about whatever I felt was important, whether it was the financial markets, human nature, politics, theology, or some event in my life.
I have hammered out well over 50,000 posts here, and my employment at this one-person organization represents by far the longest tenure I’ve had at any job, dwarfing the dozen years I spent founding, building, and selling Prophet.
I have no doubt I will leave this Earth with Slope as the definition of what it is that I did for a living. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what brought us all here.
The Journey Home
Some of you know that I started Slope for no other reason than my wife kept telling me I should write a blog. Some of you also know that calling Slope a blog is a surefire way to drive me right up a tree, so courteous readers refrain from doing so. In any event, in the simpler times of 2005, that’s the term that was used, even though Slope has obviously grown far beyond its original boundary.
On January 26 of 2005, the sale of Prophet to Ameritrade had completed, and although I was getting paid a ridiculous salary for sitting around the office and doing nothing, I knew it was neither desirable nor sustainable. I had written professionally since I was fifteen years old, and my beloved wife figured that if I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself, I might as well just dust off the typewriter and get back to it.
Tens of thousands of people have been participants on this site, and I was glancing at the customer database to see who the very first ones were, so any years ago. What’s remarkable is how receognizable these names are. I cannot imagine how they found me in the first place.
There have been innumerable changes in the world over twenty-one years, and likewise many changes here on Slope, most particularly focused on expanding what it is people can do here. As vast as the web is, I truly know of no other place that’s like it. Sure, there are other places to do charting, other places to do financial analysis, and vastly larger online communities, but the unique recipe which comprises Slope is, so far as I know, unrepeated.
Golden Age
The present administration of the U.S. government has described their reign as a Golden Age for America. I disagree. In fact, my own sense of history and cultural direction tells me the exact opposite: that this is going to be one of the darkest periods of this country’s entire history, and one which will shake its foundation to the point of questioning its survival. It is, as I’ve pointed out so many, many times over these many years, the Fourth Turning that was prophesied.
Conversely, I do think that this is going to be a golden age for Slope. We act differently here. We see differently, act differently, and choose differently. None of us have any meaningful control over what is going on in the world farther than our own family, but we can certainly have control as to the decisions we make in this new age that we have entered. Done properly, I believe the lot of us will not just survive but thrive.
A New Day
In my novel, Solid State, published precisely one year ago on this very day, I tried to write what I believe. It probably isn’t everything I believe, even at over 500 pages, but it covers a lot of ground. There is a section near the very end of the book which is germane to how I am feeling right now:
Looking back, all the forks in the road of life seemed so meaningless when he was living them, but in retrospect each became the junction leading to one irreversible future or another. If he had ever been truly aware what a difference the most trivial choice could have made to the remainder of his life, he would probably have been too petrified to ever make any decision at all.
As the images of his own history twisted and ripped their way through the flames in front of him, Wesley Williams somehow knew that he had taken the right path after all. Maybe the trail had been laid out for him all along from the day he was born, and it was simply up to him whether to keep marching forward in the right direction.
Wesley was here now. In spite of all his shortcomings, all his bad choices, and all the times he had missed the mark and felt ashamed, he knew in his heart he was still where he was meant to be.
Gazing across the distance at his wife’s eyes – those tender, loving eyes that he had fallen in love with when he was just a boy – he knew he had never left the trail on which he belonged, even though it was impossible from day to day to know for sure where the markers would be.
Somehow, he had managed to stay on the path where he knew he needed to be, even if his own foolhardiness had put his fate at risk. For reasons he could not comprehend, he had been spared his own oblivion by the pathway’s power.
I woke up this morning in my home with my wife next to me and two big dogs sleeping on top of me.
I woke up happy. I knew that’s exactly where I was supposed to be. Somehow, I wound up here.
Thank you for being here all of these years to make it possible.
I’m just going to keep writing. See you then.
