understanding patterns; connecting dots

March, April, May … 2020. Remember what it was like? The surreality of all. The world as we had known it, shut down. Suddenly, dramatically and romantically scary. Then as we emerged there was talk of the new normal. The once in a lifetime opportunity to re-set our lifestyles to prioritise the important stuff. The technology enabled catapulting of working from home. The rediscovering of connections: with our food, our neighbours and ourselves as we bunkered down. At least for those who were lucky enough to have safe and relationally stable homes. And then it happened. We pretty much bounced back to the old normal. Left to our own volition, perhaps it was inevitable. There were prophets of connection among us, who by telling their own stories, advocated for a new, slower, more centred normal that courageously turned a back on the necessary and addictive busyness of the growth economy and the well worn path on the hamster machine. They have always been there of course, but they bourgeone...

This morning I stumbled on a personal journey entry from June 23rd last year in which I coined a term that seemed to describe some patterns in my life. I left home in January 1981 as a 17 year old, spending a year as an exchange student in Japan before moving to Hobart to go to Uni. My journal entries over the next years captured annual goals and commitments that at the time reflected what felt like significant changes year to year. But looking back, I can see that the entire decade of the 80s was spent in deep inner world formation. I had left the security and unconditional love of my parents’ home and was trying to figure out who I was in the world without them. Much of my sense of self was contained within the faith communities that were increasingly where I felt at home and provided a platform for me to make a contribution in society. But a burgeoning unease with religious institutions and (from my point of view) the unconscious hypocrisy of those that represented them, drew me awa...

Paul Kelly’s  Deeper Water is an iconic ‘cycle of life’ song with a gut wrenching finale. It’s been a favourite for many years because it feels to me that whatever life teaches me, and wherever I think I am on the journey, the rips of life keep drawing me into ‘deeper water’. In the finale of the song, Paul Kelly sings the paradox -that the water is calmer the deeper you go. And so it has been. The deeper I have gone into my inner world, the less turbulent the outer world appears. The world is, of course anything but calm. After decades of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity ( VUCA ), we now live in brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible ( BANI ) societies. I am therefore leaning less on what is happening in my outer world for how I think, sense, imagine and feel. To navigate deeper into my psyche and soul I’ve had to find new guides, those for whom pathways in these domains are well travelled. Via his book SoulCraft , Bill Plotkin has introduced me to so...

We are always in transition. As I’ve written about before , not knowing the path IS probably the path. But after 18 months of uncertainty about housing and work, an 18 month transition period where we were not sure where some of the major pieces in our life would land, the uncertainty (about these things at least) came to an end. And interestingly, the period of transition ended up being bookended by the worst illnesses I’ve ever experienced. In February 2024 my world was upended when the The Make it Better Project collapsed and a few days later I flatlined in an ambulance after a severe reaction to morphine. I had two weeks with nothing but my own thoughts and a recovering body. What followed was a sabbatical of sorts which included five months in our caravan and the design of a new vocational contribution called Vocate . As 2025 started, we had begun to envisage another shift; a radical simplification of our living which included selling our house and liquidating some funds that woul...

I’ve been wondering about the influence of leaders. I’ve been wondering about the conditions that facilitate leaders contributing to major shifts in the ecosystems in which they operate. And conversely how other apparently talented and powerful people seem to be restricted in their influence. Some find pathways of ‘flow’, while others seem to be pushing against the system. For example … On November 3 rd 2020, the voting citizens of the USA chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump and the world sighed in collective relief. But as Hugh White argues in the latest Quarterly Essay , Biden’s view of America’s place in the world was grounded in the realities of 25 years previous, when the post Cold War world assumed its friendship and protection. Ironically, Trump’s instincts and prejudices mesh perfectly with the trajectory of global power structures that are seeing the US move from what White refers to as a unipolar to a multipolar power structure. The reality is, according to White, that the US...

I cut the grass this afternoon. The sun was out, the remnant autumn leaves littered the yard and driveway. I didn’t really need to because at this time of year nothing is growing very much, but it just seemed the best way to spend an hour. And I thought about the season we’re in right now and wondered what it is inviting. It makes sense that we have our long holiday breaks in the summer, when we can enjoy the long days and warm weather. That’s our way right? Endless summer days and beach rituals. But as I’ve been pondering the seasons and impending winter solstice, I wonder how our lives would be different if we celebrated the winter solstice in the yule tradition. (Of course, this is a southern hemisphere question!) Imagine if we had a week off where we paused from our go go go. Imagine if (like many of us were forced to do during the pandemic lockdowns) we bunkered down and went slow, reconnecting with ourselves, our loved ones and the things that matter. Imagine if it was the norm t...

What if time wasn’t linear after all? What if a spiral was a better model? This morning, as we walked along the river beach at low tide and bathed in the beauty of the early morning sun shrouded behind fog, Maria suggested that the season we have been living through has been a bit like an autumn. Autumn is a time of shedding, when external growth slows and nature begins to retreat into itself. The environment composts the unused harvest, harnessing the energy to invest back into preparation for the next season. That’s what it has felt like. Our frequent and at times vulnerable ponderings about our living have been almost exclusively about what we need to leave behind, rather than what we need to become or achieve. We have no regrets about what we have accumulated or become, but we are increasingly committed to being and having less, by letting go and shedding. The masks and strategies we use to navigate life are revealing themselves as we push further into our inner worlds and discover...

As I wandered along the beach a couple of days ago, a bloke with a metal detector traced a methodical path on the sand. As I passed he was digging deep with his sieve and the expression on his face was like our King Charles Cavalier Spaniel when she buries her nose into an interesting smell in the sand. Metal detecting is not an activity I am drawn to, but I did admire his searching determination. A couple of hours later I was on an aeroplane doing my own prospecting. Or maybe it wasn’t prospecting as much as awareness, but in any case, I struck gold in an unusual place. I was listening to a podcast recommended by my friend Nik. The deeply calming voice of Krista Tippett was in conversation with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. Coincidentally their topic was the Inner Landscape of Beauty, which was a wonderful and stretching dialogue, but I found myself mesmerised by the sounds of their voices. John almost sings his sentences which are strung out with slow poetic ext...