Dear Reader

Solar Plexus was started almost 10 years ago with a Credo published on 26 November 2012. My biggest audience for a single post has been 1085 readers, which is pretty small as blogs go. My smallest has been about 10.

Solar Plexus grew out of a previous blog called Undercurrents. Much of the time I’ve been writing Solar Plexus I’ve also been publishing in Politicsweb, a centrist-conservative political platform founded and edited by Dr James Myburgh.  After retirement, in the late 1990s at the age of about 62 years, I first started publishing on political subjects in the local legacy media, to use the now popular term for what used to be called the mainstream media. I’m now 85 and so I’ve been doing this for over 20 years – which, for me, is a long time.

I’ve been moderately successful if I set my sights fairly low. I’ve been published by the Mail and Guardian, Sunday Times, Business Day, the Cape Times, the Argus, The Independent, the Jewish Chronicle and a couple of others which are now defunct or I have forgotten. I was more in demand early on when my voice was fresher and was more in tune with the optimism of our new democracy, and achieved a small but satisfying degree of name recognition.

For almost 10 years I was an active part of the Media Team supporting Israel at  a time when the progressive English newspapers, which means almost all of them, followed the Kasrils-BDS line. Nothing much has changed since then. Israel in addition to its own sins and errors is the victim of double standards. It’s far from unique in this respect, though as a pro-Zionist Jew I’m especially sensitive to such trends. But it remains for me an heroic and unlikely story of success against huge odds of all kinds.

Public writing has been a most rewarding vocation. It has brought me into contact with other individuals, minds, points of view and systems of thought and analysis which has enriched me intellectually and emotionally and has provided a focus for creative energy which otherwise may have proved destructive.

But the time has come to take a break. I have found the self-imposed discipline of commentary increasingly difficult and emotionally stultifying. My reading has become obsessively political, even trivial, in nature and at the same time too unfocussed and distracted.

Part of this is undoubtedly a degree of age-dependent cognitive sclerosis, but part is a conflict between the mundane daily political dramas and social media/street theatre of politics and what we solemnly call, “the deeper questions.”

In some ways I’m overwhelmed by the multidimensionality of life and I want to feel free to explore it (and my own journey) without the distraction of producing something for public consumption. I want to liberate myself to ponder without needing to reduce my ponderings to a digestible item for public consumption.

I want to be free to write rubbish, to be embarrassingly honest and to read widely out of my usual channels (wonderful and enlightening though they have been).

Or not to write at all. Since thinking alone is the sterile I still hope to share with others but not to a timetable and with whom I please.

But It’s been a wonderful journey. Thank you for sharing it with me.

Mike Berger