Taking the Fight to Poseidon

A new face

It’s been a while. Either read this section to get the history of the last six months of quiet or skip down to A Finer Focus.

The year 2023 was when I decided I wanted to get serious about being a writer. Between January and April, I wrote a rough draft for my first book about cultivating a family culture. In April 2023, I launched my first newsletter and called it The Weekly Rhythm which drilled down into some of the ideas I was working with in the book. Unfortunately, I gave so much focus to the newsletter that I stalled out on the book.

My attention was split in several directions. The unfinished family culture book. The Weekly Rhythm. Daily posts and threads on Twitter (which has now become X). A novel that I had aspirations for but not worked on in months. A goal to build a business as a freelance writer. I was stalling out fast and not making any progress on any of those goals. I decided to put The Weekly Rhythm on a hiatus.

I’ve gone from three to six chapters in the novel and started to get frustrated with the quality of my first large work of fiction. My rough draft on the family culture book has sat untouched because I struggle with imposter syndrome. Who am I to tackle the subject when I’m not perfect myself? Then Tom Meitner (one of my favorite guys on X) served up this meal of wisdom: “Procrastination is perfectionism.”

Procrastination is perfectionism.

I said it twice because I had to hear it twice to process what he said. I wrote it on our family command center whiteboard at home and stared at it for several days. It was the statement that slapped me out of my stupor.

My primary focus needed to be on establishing a freelance business. I didn’t want to have a newsletter or posts about freelancing, though. Family culture was still in my passions and I wanted to talk about that while helping other men with their own family focus. I kept having these ideas. Finally while listening to Brian Sauve’s Hearth Songs EP, a vision came to me of what this newsletter could be. I was inspired by the song Old Neptune, He’s Roaring which encourages boys to embrace their quest for honor and glory by having courage to trust their King, slay dragons, fight giants, and get the girl. “Come further up, further in!” The thought came to pivot from Roman mythology to Greek and a finer focus was born.

A Finer Focus

There is a need to fight Poseidon.

When I was writing The Weekly Rhythm, I had a general focus of helping men grow as pater familias: father of the family. Yet, over the last several months an ominous shadow began to loom over what I surveyed in the world around me. I have the large responsibility to mentor young men in their late teens and early twenties regularly. Not one or two, here or there. Dozens. The shadow over them is their prolonged adolescence. By behavior and maturity, it seems like many of them never develop past twelve years old to become men that contribute to the world. They are not stepping from boyhood into manhood and they’ve already been in that rut for several years.

You may have heard this referred to as failure to launch. What happens when boys who fail to launch grow older? They struggle. Many will have children while they themselves are still functioning boys. This also affects grown men who have been able to overcome the odds, take action, and launch themselves into life. Company mixes. Difficulty ensues. None of us have paths of perfection mapped out for us. Chaos is in the waters and men everywhere are struggling to navigate in a world that doesn’t look familiar anymore.

In the Bible, the sea is presented as a place of chaos. The open waters away from land are an unknown wilderness that is dark with threats. Leviathan dwells in the sea. In Greek mythology, Poseidon is the god of the sea.

This newsletter is created to be your friend in dark waters.

We won’t always see every course correction needed to navigate before we start sailing into the darkness.

In the face of chaos, we must get back to the surface when we start to sink.

We must go further up and further in. We must not shrink back from the looming dangers and what-ifs and unknowns.

We must fight Poseidon.

A Path Forward

For me, writing this newsletter is one way I am challenging myself not to give up. We’re in this together. I want to throw myself into the watery arena. Every two weeks, I will make sure this newsletter gets sent to your inbox.

I want to help boys launch. I want to give them an adventure to give themselves to. I want to challenge them past the inertia of not moving. There could be studies dropped in here that prove how boys are lagging behind in multiple arenas. There will certainly be exceptions to that as we are tempted to look at our own sons as those exceptions, but survey the males around you. Are the young ones motivated and ambitious to take on the world in front of them? For that matter, are the older males motivated and ambitious? I also want to bolster up men who need someone in their corner.

From my point of observation, I see many who feel like they are starting from a point of failure so why try. They are not in a growth mindset. There is a lot of fatalism that things will always be the way they are and that isn’t true.

This is a massive topic. There are multiple layers of concerns and factors going into the resistance boys and men are facing. There’s a huge temptation to feel like we must know all the answers and have perfect clarify before we can move forward and challenge Poseidon.

We will assess and take action in the coming weeks, but for now we need to face that it does not have to be the way it is. Wherever you’re starting from, there’s an opportunity for us to dig in deeper and encourage boys and men to rise beyond their current situation. They especially need to know they do not have to be a victim of whatever whirlpool they seem to be inescapably stuck in.

What can you do this week? Don’t give up.

Share the newsletter if you know a father or son who needs a brother in the battle.

See y’all in two weeks.

~ J.P. Simons