understanding patterns; connecting dots

I am grateful for contentment. It's kind of old fashioned, I know. I don't hear it espoused or discussed much, but I have a hunch that understanding it more deeply could be helpful.  The way I experience it, contentment is more than 'satisfaction with the current status', which is the classic dictionary insight. For me contentment is infused with peace and joy. It does not disqualify ambition for 'better', but is a state of living that enables intention without compulsion. One of the enablers of contentment is integrity; by which I mean a consistency between the image I project of who I am, and the reality of who I am when no one is watching. For me, when this gap widens I physically feel my content-o-metre decline. It is also about the gap between the world I desire and the world I experience.  As I write, people all around the world are putting their bodies on the line to draw attention to the chasm between what we know needs to be done to add...

She was so, so consistent. Reliable, stable, unwavering, yet gentle and warm. So much happened in our Leven Street home; every room, the passages, the back porch, the playroom and even the garage where I seldom saw her were domains of all the kinds of living you’d imagine from a family with growing boys and girls, and yet none of it was home unless she was there. In the rare times we were at home without her, it felt like we were simply biding our time until she returned. Without her, life was on pause. One ordinary but memorable day I arrived home from school to an empty house. No one home. I would discover later that mum had some benign reason for being out, but at the time it rocked my world. It was as if I had walked onto the set of a horror movie where the earth was deserted of life, a ghost town. I felt anxious. I need not have been; everything was in order, there was food in the cupboards, everything was clean and tidy as it always was … but she was not ther...

July 2009 Tonight is our last night at Clarkes Beach on this winter sojourn. This annual pilgrimage and celebration of so many good things in life began for us when this photo was taken in July 2009, about 20 metres from where I am sitting tonight. So much has changed ... Pat the Patrol got sold earlier this year. I was so tempted to hang into him, put him in a garage for 20 years and cash in, but in the end the cash to help fund the new caravan won out. That Ripcurl surf board was the first one I ever owned. The sales bloke at the Torquay store told me it was a good hybrid; sufficiently buoyant to let me begin, and shaped to allow me to progress. The fins were 'new' technology' that clipped in. I spent hours on that board, mostly in the white water. I got more injured than competent in the early days ... not stretching properly and pulling hammies, learning the hard way not to let the board get between by head and a wave. And, despite his well meaning sales e...

I have great memories of my early international work trips. Primarily, I was energised by the strategic thinking, the sense of purpose and meaning, and my admiration for many of the people I met and with whom I became closely associated within a global network. We believed our work mattered and that together we could change the world.  And there was an undeniable appreciation of the perks of international jet-setting. In those days it was invariably a 747 and pre-911 it was acceptable to congregate in the economy exit rows near the galley, and for a couple of people to sit on the rear-facing flight attendants' seats to form a group conversation. I spent hours with colleagues over the Pacific, dreaming of a better world and consuming the free top shelf alcohol that flowed freely in those days. They were heady days for me and some of my best work memories are from the gatherings I was fortunate enough to attend in north America and Europe. The world opened up for me and I de...

It's late-ish on a Friday evening and I am alone with my thoughts ... and they are mixed bunch. They come from different parts of (my) life; new recipes from home cooked meals in Vasto planning for a new client project that has me reaching for books from my library that haven't been cracked open for a few years images and impressions from the design and travel journals that I digested slowly over a solo pizza dinner at Annie's frustration that my foray into learning to play music has taken a pause in recent weeks   preparatory thinking for steering the discussion at a board meeting I will chair next week troubling and conflicting reflections about elite-ism, democracy and first nation's justice from this last week's two day gathering of civil society leaders in the national capital a commitment to recapture my childhood love of drawing and graphics Friday night football anxiety about my lack of exercise due to travel and illness a commitment to lea...

About a year ago I wandered into the Muji store in Melbourne and fell in love with a spoon. I love the simplicity and functionality of Japanese design and this spoon was weighted perfectly with a optimally designed shallow ladle for transferring sauces into bowls. Kitchen bliss. My other favourite spoon is a wooden one that lives in my dad's kitchen. He reckons it is about as old as their marriage which is nearing 60 years. The head of the spoon is probably half the size it once was. The wood is dark and patchy. The tip is almost flat from decades of stirring against the bottom of a pan. The sides are smooth and shaped by countless rotations in pots of all shapes and sizes.  Japanese culture includes the wonderful idea of wabi sabi; beauty through imperfection. Wabi sabi is not about imperfection as a consequence of mediocre design and/or manufacturing, Wabu sabi is about the beauty that comes from growth, use, scars. My leather messenger bag that I've used most day...

The bucket list thing doesn't work for me, I think because in my experience satisfaction is an inner world thing rather than an experiential one. But that's not to say that there aren't some things that have felt like unfinished business, and one of those things has been to walk The Overland Track. The story goes back a long way. Cradle Mountain was in my backyard growing up. I remember driving up there for family outings ... in those days there were windy country roads, cattle grids and slippery muddy tracks that eventually got us to Waldheim Chalet and then on to Dove Lake. At uni I had friends who loved and knew the Park. I listened to their stories of the Pelion mountains and the iconic track that led south toward Lake St Clair. I climbed Cradle Mountain in Blundstones and one of those checkered woollen bush shorts. I sat with some friends in Cradle Mountain Lodge and ate dinner at what used to be communal tables where you served each other while the devils a...

It is our actions, not our words, that indicate what we believe. The gap between what we say we believe and what we actually do is the measure of our integrity. I am really lucky to have among my friends and colleagues people I admire deeply, people who aspire to make a positive difference in the world. This is my professional tribe. We talk about how to make the world better all the time. I am involved with some incredible projects and organisations who do amazingly good stuff; initiatives that you might say are part of the solution rather than the problem. Recently I’ve been doing some soul searching. It has been triggered by reading a couple of provocative books, but as Maria said today, the things we have been pondering of late have been a long time coming. We have been aware of some disturbing facts about economic injustice and the effects of our lifestyle on our environment for a long time … but it is hard, very hard, to make choices that compromise the lifestyle we...