The pace of my entries has faltered recently from the high of the previous six to eight weeks. There have been a variety of reasons, though most of them boil down to one concern. The need for fallow periods, times when one's thoughts are too tentative, even jumbled, to be put together into any sort of cogent statement. To resist, or to discount this necessity is to fall prey to one of the most damaging assumptions in circulation today; that "production" is the only useful measure, and anything interfering with it is to be pushed aside. There is a tyranny to a deadline. It is one of the pernicious factors that turns professionals into hacks and therefor an underlying cause of our crises of expertise and leadership. For me to let myself fall into this trap would be to accept the hobbles of such an external imperative, with none of the perks – like getting paid to write on schedule!