At a meeting last week, one of my editors at Psychology Today told us about something she experienced while writing a book: insecurity that caused her to belabor counterfactuals to the point of torpidity, something my academic adviser in college, Chalmers Knight, calls having Mind Lock. She would stop writing and think, “Who am I to be writing this?” But she said she came to see her insecurity as a good thing, because it was humbling and inspired her to do the best job she could do. Now she thinks that writers who *don’t* stop to question if they’re good enough or qualified enough to be writing what they’re writing are probably neither.

I hope this is the case, because lately torpidity has been looming over me like the storm clouds that threaten to flood the tent cities in Haiti.

It’s going to be a busy week…