understanding patterns; connecting dots

Last weekend I did my first solo bushwalk and swimming excursion. Saturday’s hike wasn’t particularly long, only about 10kms. But more than half of it was spent on soft sloping sand walking into a stiff breeze. By the time I climbed the track back up the escarpment I was wasted, and when I dragged myself into the camping area about 2.30 in the afternoon, my appetite for further adventure that day was near zero. And so I found myself in my tent, shutting up shop for the day in the near broad daylight hour of 7.30pm! At Maria’s suggestion I’d downloaded a couple of podcasts for such a time as this. Truth was I was pretty confident I’d not listen to them … I didn’t imagine myself with headphones in on a solo bush excursion, but there you go. It turned out to be one of two encounters I’ve had this week with prominent Australians who have recently made a major professional transition. The story of those transitions is not the main point here, they deserve proper consideration in their own r...

We recently visited family in the Northern Rivers hinterland. It was good in the usual ways. Except that one morning a few unrelated and incidental things unsettled me, and I lay in bed mulling over them. It wasn’t a great start to the day. It had been a while since I’d felt that way and I wondered not only what had triggered it, but why I wasn’t able to re-centre as quickly as I normally do. It helped me appreciate how significant my regular morning routine has become, so this post is to record something of the story of how it evolved into the multifaceted practice I now enjoy. I’ve always been a so-called ‘morning person’. Whether it was being up before anyone else in my residential college during uni days to think and study, or cleaning supermarket floors at ungodly hours to make ends meet when our kids were young, I’ve always felt at home in the morning hours, while most others are sleeping. We were incredibly fortunate to move into this seaside village across the road from Karen a...

OK, so this is personal. I had to think twice before writing about it on here … but I guess I’m either doing this transparency thing or I’m not. If I was writing in my hard copy journal, this is what I would be writing about … so here we go. A little background / caveat: Over the years I’ve dug deep to try to understand my insecurities, the illusions I have of myself, my hopes of how others will perceive me and the games I play in relation to these. I have no expectations, and in fact it would be wrong to assume, that anyone else shares these same idiosyncratic psychological pathologies. These wrestlings are mine. Maybe they trigger some things for you … but that is your business not mine. This morning I got an email in my inbox that triggered a train of thoughts that took me down a painful rabbit hole. It wasn’t about the email per se, it was because of who it came from. Let’s call him David. I’m on a list that means I get emails from him every week. They are some of the best emails I...

  I’m writing this on Wednesday. It was 12 months ago on this day that I recovered consciousness in an ambulance with defibrillator paddles hovering over my chest after 10 seconds of flatlining. Maria spent the best part of 30 minutes in an emergency department waiting room not knowing if I was alive or dead. A few days prior to that, my worklife had been violently and unexpectedly upended by completely unrelated incidents. Our lives would be catapulted in a direction we had no inclination of a week before. And we are not alone, in fact unexpected life-changing trauma is common. Economic and social privilege does not insure or protect us. A few months prior to that fateful week 12 months ago, my mate Muz and I collided in the surf and for a terrifying ½ hour there were five of us lying and kneeling on a cold morning beach with the waves lapping us, not knowing if he would ever have use of his limbs again. He has recovered almost completely, but it could have been different. Life is...

As I sit down to think into words this week, I’m reminding myself that this is not for you :-). It can be tempting to write for you, my audience. But this practice is about transparency, about making some of my musings available to others who identify with my efforts to live with integrity. So as much as I love that you’re on this journey with me, please remember that this conversation is primary with myself. I have three things on my mind as I sit at the start of another week. Being of service is costly. A disturbance in my soul is still my best invitation to do inner work. My ‘experimentation’ with being present is more transformational than I had imagined. Being of service is costly In my morning practice and routine, I remind myself of my commitments in this season of uncertainty. One of the six is to be of service: Every morning I ask myself, ‘What is mine to do today? For whom and what?’ It’s romantic until it’s not. It’s attractive until it costs. I’ve got two commitments over t...

On a memorable late Thursday afternoon about 18 months ago, I was sitting around a table with a group of wonderful people sharing food and drinks as we pondered a tricky question: “In what way are you part of the problems in the world?”. As the conversations bounced around and things got increasingly personal, as they do in these Table discussions, my friend Annie made one of those contributions that invokes involuntary expressions of affirmation. She said something like, “I think most, if not all that’s wrong with the world, can be traced back to the fact that we think we can live as if we are disconnected from each other and the planet.” I’ve thought a lot about that since. I think she was right. And if she was, that most of our social problems can be traced back to the belief or mindset that we can live as if we are independent, then it follows that we need to reboot our worldview and install a new mindset that understands the connectedness of life, that, as our popular anthem says,...

You know that thing where you think you understand something … then you discover there are layers you never knew existed. Well that … when it comes to the idea of living in the present. There’s the cliches that were born of wisdom but have been appropriated by bucket-listing popular culture as in; ‘All we’ve got is today’, ‘What if you knew you only had five years.’ etc etc. Yeah, no. Not that, although they are great things to consider. A few friends expressed concern for me following  my last post . They wondered how I was, expecting that the shifts and uncertainty might be causing some anxiety. But, to be clear, I’m doing magnificently. I’m good. Better than good. The wrestle is the with question about how to live beautifully  with  uncertainty and chaos (to steal a  Pema Chödrön  phrase), not to find strategies to eliminate it. But I’m not pursuing a Pollyanna approach, a superficial suppressive positivity, I’m realising the antithesis, in fact. The narrativ...

A couple of mornings ago I was sitting at coffee and a friend looked me in the eye and says, “I sense there is a bit going on.” I subsequently did a rubbish job at trying to explain some things. It prompted me to sit down and think more clearly about what  is  going on for us. So here goes. There are transitions in 3 dimensions. 1. I’m navigating a seasonal career change. 2. We are making some ‘step changes’ to better align our living with our espoused values. 3. We are wrestling with what it means to live wisely as the world as we have known it unravels. The easiest one of these to explain is 1. Then 2 and 3 get deeper and ultimately more substantial. There is stuff going on in the outer world. But the inner world journey is for us the main game, and our wrestling with 2 and mainly 3 is where that comes to the fore. I’ve stumbled, and been confusing in my conversations with people about what we’re processing because I’ve cherry picked bits and pieces from each of 1, 2 & 3...