Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Buxton

Success, Buxton suggests, is less a destination than a weather system: exhilarating in its first gust, dulling once you’ve adjusted your stance. The line turns on “palls” a word with a faint taste of fatigue and overfamiliarity. It’s a quiet rebuke to the Victorian faith in accumulation and arrival, coming from a public servant steeped in the machinery of incremental wins, committee victories, reforms that look grand on paper and feel routine the day after.

What makes the metaphor work is its implied critique of the success narrative. Buxton doesn’t deny achievement; he demotes it. The “joyous time” is not the trophy but the first movement the moment when risk, uncertainty, and possibility are still alive. “Breeze first strikes your sails” is tactile and external, suggesting the best part of ambition is partly out of your control: luck, timing, the world’s sudden opening. Then “waters rustle under your bows” brings the body back in; you can feel progress as sound and vibration before it becomes a résumé line.

The subtext is also psychological: habituation is undefeated. The thrill of making headway fades as soon as success becomes your new baseline, and your identity starts policing its own momentum. In a public life where causes and careers can harden into status, Buxton is praising the beginner’s mind - not naïveté, but that early interval when you’re propelled by motion rather than validated by outcome.