understanding patterns; connecting dots

It’s a melancholy Sunday afternoon. It’s a bit weird actually, middle of summer (yesterday was the classic beach day) but now it’s raining and dark and I’ve got a slow brewing broth on the stove for some lamb and barley soup - so it smells like winter inside despite the fact I’m in shorts and T-shirt and shoeless. I had a celebratory morning with some swimming friends for a birthday, then did an open water swim in the river in glassy clear conditions before the dark clouds, thunder and rain defined the day. Slow brewed stuff tastes better right? The flavours are deeper and richer and more complex. And even better when you’re doing it yourself because, like right now for me, you get to savour the process by being immersed in the aromas. So why is it harder for me to savour slowly brewing stuff in the rest of life? Stay with me on this for a few paragraphs … Yesterday we had an open for inspection for our house. The rationale was that there would be lots of visitors around and we’d get s...

Reality as we perceive it comes from the story we (mostly unconsciously) tell ourselves. And we rarely make the story up ourselves, it is typically the story that the media (news, marketing, pop culture and TV drama, etc) tell us. One of the stories that I have, perhaps cognitively rejected, but for all intents and purposes have bought into, is the story that security and certainty offer peace. Further, that security and certainty is a product of outer world things such as income, housing, and other material ‘things’. While I may have agreed intellectually that this is not the case, I struggle to practice an alternative in my living, in part because I haven’t known what the alternative is. Paradoxically, it seems the path to true peace is to let go of the things I think offer me security and certainty. When I tell myself that I am ‘self-made’, that my lifestyle and it’s privileges are of my own making, the story I am believing is that I am entitled to what I have, and that anything tha...

I suspect the titanic, which Jem Bendall calls Imperial Modernity, has already hit the iceberg. Owning that suspicion means I feel increasingly alienated. My growing awareness is of the likelihood of societal collapse. Or to use the titanic metaphor, the knowledge that the ship that carries the institutions of democratic capitalism (including economic and financial institutions, food systems, education systems, government institutions and systems, biosphere 'management' etc) has already hit the iceberg, and that the damage is already fatal. The bedrock pillars of modernity are unrecoverable.  I say 'alienated' because so few of my friends have been digesting the material feeding that knowledge and awareness. If I weren't me, I'd think I'd lost the plot, or at least had gone a bit too far down the lefty rabbit hole. I don't blame them. If we have not been exposed to the idea of collapse, less dramatically called the great disruption, then all we have is t...

  In mid 2015 I first encountered the idea of essentialism as a subscriber to Kinfolk Magazine. The June edition was called The Essentials Issue . I was immediately drawn to the practice ;  Deciding what is essential in our lives isn't about paring back our belongings and forgoing our beloved but unnecessary frivolities: Instead of determining how little we can live with, it's about working out what we cannot live without. You can't can't explore the idea of Essentialism without coming across Greg McKeown's book which popularised the idea. Although the book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less , was framed to be applied to improve 'productivity', the ideas are generally applicable to all areas of life. When I reviewed it again last night, I was reminded that a commitment to an essentialist lifestyle is actually mainly about saying 'no'; about applying our limited resources and assets to the necessary things only. We are on the precipice of...

  I'm lucky to be in a book club, a fabulous small bunch of blokes who read interesting books and get together once a month in our local pub (and later at the Italian restaurant for affogato and dessert). I'm a newby. This month was my turn to offer a book. Dangerously, I submitted a title I hadn't read, but one from a writer I know and trust, Alain de Botton. His latest book, A Therapeutic Journey , offers insight into the minds and lives of those of us struggling to stay well mentally. It was heavy going for some of us. A bit close to home and a bit heavy, but deeply appreciated by others. The strength of the book from my reading, was the normalising of mental sickness. We know that mental illness has become a common, almost ubiquitous phenomena, draining so much life from families, communities and workplaces, let alone the quality of life for those who suffer. De Botton offers an invitation to understand and therefore empathise with those who's internal demons have t...

On the drive away from Mount Roland in northern Tasmania, we were talking about how this mountain felt inviting, friendly almost. It's not that her dolerite peaks and jagged rocky faces don't deserve deep respect. We wondered out loud ... I'm not a mountain person really, but I am fascinated by the idea that mountains, and the environment more generally, have personality and character. Mount Roland is not part of a range, at least not a significant one. It rises alone from the farming landscape. It owns a community ... the rural village of Sheffield is strongly associated with the mountain and indeed, she gives the town its character. Her foothill slopes appear gentle and even 'organised' as the cleared land and forests give way to imposing cliff faces. The way the cleared land and trees are organised around her skirt invite excursion. In my uni days I was friends with people who built a hut at the top of one of the bits of cleared land, right on the edge of the dol...

  Anthropologist Franz Boaz studied the life of Inuit people on Baffin Island back in the late 1800s. His work is the root of the myth about Inuit people having 50 words for snow, the cliché that we've probably all heard at some point. Not surprisingly, there is more to the story (not least because there are 100s of Inuit language groups), but there is a grain of truth in that they have multiple ways to describe what we simply know as 'snow'. Similarly, for those of us who are regular swimmers, to 'go for a swim' is a meaningless term, or at least 'more information is needed' to understand exactly what is going on. For my little swim community, here are the terms we use without explanation to describe swimming. (not to be taken too seriously!) 1. Rinse When you spend just 5-10 minutes bollarding (standing), catching white water, and have a general frolic to start the day. Weekdays at RAAFs. 2. Dip Similar to rinse, except often stay longer, and more often th...

When I turned 50 I had a big gathering in the basement of donkey wheel house in the CBD. It was a gathering of family and friends. In those days my connection to friends was almost exclusively via work. It was a retrospective event: Five different people gave a little speech about each decade of my life and those gathered in the room represented the various communities that had shaped me over the years. It was fabulous.  I have always considered myself lucky. But one of the things that I knew I had missed in the middle decades of life was casual ‘mates’, by which I mean people who I was genuinely comfortable with outside of work and family. I knew lots of people, I’m a friendly bloke. But I missed having honest conversations with people who I felt like I had stuff in common with. It wasn’t a mystery why this was missing. My life was so full of family, work and the complexities of living in a metropolis that there was no time for community sport or the other connections that facilit...