Viewing entries tagged
fear

Plot choices

Since January 1, there have been three specific subjects that have leapt to the surface of all the conversations I've been having. On both sides of the vax fence, across the wealth and privilege spectrum, and with no regard to age or gender, these three threads of consciousness keep spiking up, like a heartbeat monitor, or a FaceBook ad. Ordinarily I might have overlooked them as, well, pretty legitimate concerns given the world we're in right now. But, the three threads together caught my attention, so here we are.

The first thread is this:

"It's a new year, I must plan my days, make some resolutions."

The second, not surprisingly, is this one:

"The world is so uncertain right now. I feel more fear than hope. I don't know how I'll actually get through this year."

And the third, probably due to my role as a Story Coach, is this:

"I'm not a storyteller."

Maybe you can see already how these three ideas connect, but it took me a while. I had to close my eyes and just type it out - freewriting the tangled mess of thoughts and intuition in my head. As I typed, I realised I was feeling some anger, and frustration, and some hope.

I'm frustrated at most of humanity, to be honest, including myself. Every time we say "I'm not a storyteller" or "I don't have any good stories to tell" or "I just live a normal boring life" it jars my soul. Because we are ALL storytellers. We are constantly telling and retelling our stories, to ourselves, to our friends and family and kids and social networks. We go to sleep telling our stories to ourselves, making things mean this or that, blaming this person or that person, validating this hurt or elevating this piece of ego. We are prolific storytellers.

This is the whole reason I do what I do: I think EVERYONE needs to share their stories. I think it's vital for humanity, that the rest of us hear what you have discovered about the world we're all scrambling through. We are all built to consume stories, and we are all, always, telling them. And while my job is to help people craft their ideas in a way that is meaningful, the paradigm goes far beyond books and presentations. We have the power to craft our life stories in the same way.

But, when our crafting ends up on auto-pilot, our stories end up just feeding our ego, or our pain, or our pride. Even though they have such great power to nourish our souls with deeper elements like meaning, peace and hope.

(I guess this is all sounding a bit mad by now, but stay with me. I'll either bring this home, or completely lose my way. It's really 50/50 at this stage...)

For me, what connects the three big ideas together - making plans, fear and uncertainly, storytelling - is CHOICE.

A writer is constantly making choices about the events that are included in their story. While absolutely EVERYTHING might happen to a character, not everything deserves equal weight, and the writer will elevate some events, diminish others, and even cut some scenes from the book, in order to keep the focus on what is important. And we do the exact same thing in our lives. When we retell our stories, and when we are right in the middle of living a story, we will unconsciously elevate certain events and diminish others. I do this all the time, and very often I end up with a story that feeds my own ego: "here's a story of my day that shows how awesome I am..." or worse, "...how tragic my life is."

The power a writer has, and the power we all have in life, is this: We have the agency to elevate or diminish the impact of an event in our lives. And we can craft the telling of these events in such a way as to transform ourselves, and those around us.

Even with all the uncertainty, we can still ask ourselves questions like "what is valuable in life?" "what do I believe about love? Hope? Beauty?" And then we sort through the mess of life events, elevate some and diminish others, and slowly craft a story that resonates with that message.

The way we shape our stories can bring hope, encourage a fresh perspective on life, contribute to a deep insight of the world, all of those things. When we don't have so much control over the events, we still have control over the telling of the story, and it's my hope that all of us take up the "storyteller" mantle for ourselves, and curate our experiences in a way that will nourish our souls, and eventually, perhaps the soul of the world too.

Looking for the exits

Last year, I wrote about Rach's shakti mat. It was all about distributing conflict, so as to avoid one piece of discomfort becoming so sharp and urgent that it takes over our whole life. It's a great read, I think (and you can find it at nathanmaddigan.com/blog) but it turns out, I'm not done with this damn shakti mat.

Yesterday, I was lying on it again. And it hurt so much.

First I tried to ignore the pain - you know, think happy thoughts, tell myself stories, replay a tv show in my head - but that didn't work at all. So then I tried to get away from the pain somehow. I'd sit up, try and roll over a bit, arch my back so that less tiny spikes were stabbing me. But nothing helped.

It was exhausting, and frustrating, and somehow, the pain kept hurting. And it felt broad, like it was everywhere. Any mental exit I ran to was suddenly blocked by the pain. Happy thoughts, stories, the tv show, they all had this cloud of discomfort that dropped between us, so that I couldn't find the door handle and escape.

My mind felt like it was rolling around in a soft panic, unconsciously pushing back against the pain, searching for a way out.

After a few minutes of this torture, I tried something new. I gave up.

I stopped looking for exits and just leaned all the way into the mat, and focussed my attention on the needles pressing into my skin.

It was a completely different experience. My mind cleared, the panic subsided, and I felt free to just put that pain into its own compartment. Once I allowed myself to focus directly on the pain, I could see its edges, and it wasn't as huge as I thought. It wasn't all-consuming.

It was there, but it wasn't EVERYWHERE. When I was ignoring it and searching for relief, it felt like it was everywhere, and it was trapping me, controlling me. When I looked directly at it, I kind of trapped the pain instead. I could see all the exits now, I had some perspective back.

As I kept doing this focusing-thing: eyes closed, attention narrowed to the pointy daggers in my back, I began to notice something else: the pain was becoming less. My body was getting used to it, my mind was observing it, and I began relaxing, softening.

It was doing its Shakti-mat-healing thing, I suppose. The pain was slowly replaced with a warmth, as the blood flowed to areas on my skin that needed it the most.

Whatever was happening there, five minutes later I was so comfortable I had a nap. Truly. Right there on a bed of nails.

Now, please, please hear me: this post isn't really about pain, per se. I'm in no way suggesting that I have some kind of zen-like solution to pain, especially debilitating chronic pain, and I'm definitely not playing it down. Experiencing ANY amount of pain sucks. It hurts, sometimes a whole lot. Sometimes it takes over your entire life, and every day is a struggle to keep going.

With deep respect to those who experience this kind of life, it would be daftly naive of me to profess to know how you feel, or give you some kind of solution. This post is not *that*.

If anything, this experience with the shakti mat might just be a metaphor for the way many of us deal with discomfort.

In storytelling, characters will always try and avoid discomfort. They look away, turn away, walk away, avoid, ignore, distract... It's human nature, and it's okay. If a character didn't do it, we wouldn't even believe the story. It would seem somehow false.

The problem is, while the characters try and avoid all discomfort, the writer is spending all their time focusing on it. Writers know that stories need conflict. That conflict drives change, decision, transformation, all of that. So the writer will be considering the pain in great detail, finding the best way to get it right up in the face of the characters so that they must engage with it, and respond to it somehow.

I hate discomfort. And conflict, and pain. I'd choose comfort every chance I get, just quietly.

But, this shakti mat helped me realise that when there does happen to be a pain, a discomfort in my life somewhere, things do NOT go well for me or those around me if all I do is run about in a panic, looking for exits. I don't treat people well, I don't think straight, and I often don't even know exactly what it is that is hurting me. I only know that it keeps getting in the way of my exit strategy.

It's only when I stop unconsciously reacting to the hurt, and deliberately look at the source, not the exits, that I find my way forward.

So, with all that Rach and I have on this coming year, I know there will be great discomforts, great challenges and conflicts and hurdles to get over together, and as a character I'm completely terrified of that.

But as a writer, I'm wildly excited about this story. This year is going to be great.

Deus ex machina

This week Rach and I had lunch with our accountant, Hau (pronounced "how," just to save your brain for the remainder of this post.)

Hau is an incredibly generous, powerful and humble soul, who has taken care of me ever since we studied business and accounting together. In those classes, he was the A-grade student who would have his head down, scribbling furiously and soaking in all the information, while I was the art-brained student, clearly on the wrong career path, staring out the window and falling asleep on the desk.

I don't even know how we became friends, but decades later here we are - meeting over lunch to talk about family, love, tax and cryptocurrency.

On our way in, Rach and I were not doing well. We were shattered, heart-sore and bank-account-sore, to be honest. We are in the middle of a thing that demands all our time and all our savings, so each day is a battle to stay above the chaos. Our "thing" is epic - the destination is so exciting - but some days, the journey really hurts.

So we drove in silence. We took some deep breaths and sometimes reached for each other's hand. I couldn't get my words right, and there was a lump in my throat.

The restaurant was in the Crown complex, so we drove to the free parking area then started walking. In a few minutes we were surrounded by shiny lights, glass towers, theatres and bars. The casino was pumping. As we passed the entry, each gripping the other's hand a little too tight, I imagined just swinging in to the roulette table. "Five minutes," I'd tell Rach, and then I'd bet the car, or something, and win big, and walk out with a cool million in cash, and then finally be able to buy Hau lunch instead of the other way round.

Hau meets us with laughs and hugs, shaking his head at everything that's going on in his life. "Eat! Eat!" he tells us, "what are we just sitting here for?" And we head to the buffet. I'm still deciding which kind of rice should accompany my first scoop of curry and Hau swings past with a plate full of vegetables and greens and something that looks like salmon crossed with a dumpling crossed with a cucumber. "Come on Nathan! Fill your plate man!"

I'm still thinking about the casino. How great life would be if we just won a bazillion dollers. How much of the chaos could be removed.

—

In ancient Greek and Roman drama, there was a practice that playwrights often employed to resolve the chaotic plot lines in their stories. When everything got too messy, instead of working the characters through conflict, growth and change, the writers would simply have one of their many gods turn up to solve everything.

Literally, two minutes before the end of the play, an actor playing a god would appear, suspended by a crane over the stage, and they would fix everything.

In Latin, this was called “deus ex machina.”

God, from a machine.

We use the same phrase today in writing, to describe random acts or events that save everything, that come out of nowhere and just fix all the chaos and resolve all the conflict. It’s the weakest way to resolve a plot, and the audience feels it instinctively: all this conflict was built up, ready for some powerful story-moments, and then, poof! Any sense of meaning turns to disappointment, eye-rolling, frustration.

All that aside, I’d still be up for a super-improbable event to solve all my problems. Maybe a rich relative could leave me a mansion?

—

Hau is talking about crypto now. There was a big crash in the market recently, and many investors were left with nothing. Hau said that those who lost everything were the ones who put all their hopes in the one magical crypto stock that they hoped would take them to the moon. They stopped trying, growing, learning, he said, and instead they just waited.

I ask what stops him from becoming like them - content to just wait for the big rescue. He pauses to think, and then tells us that every morning when he wakes, he signs the cross, and gives thanks for his breath, his health, the sunlight on his face, the children in his household. He doesn’t demand or expect a magical rescuer. He just gets into the work, and remains thankful for any provision that comes his way.

I look over his shoulder to the flashing lights of the keno machines, and give a little sigh.

As we walk back across the parking lot, nothing has been solved. Hau didn’t fix us, we didn’t win a million dollars, and we’re already late for our next thing. But, Hau did give us a "next step," and we’re already talking excitedly about the work. We’re either foolish or courageous, but either way we’re not afraid to get back into the work, to keep going in the conflict.

I hope our audience never gets the chance to roll their eyes at us. I hope that we can keep going, keep engaging in the highs and lows. There is so much meaning to be found, moments to experience, good work to complete, and so many incredible humans to share life with.

We are capable of bringing our own order into the chaos, and if a "deus ex machina" moment happens, we’ll take it for sure, but it’s going to have to keep up, because we’ve got work to do.

One year

A year ago, Rach and I got married. In a beautiful mess of laughter and tears and kisses, we put rings on fingers, made vows and commitments, and danced through the night. It was a powerful day, a chapter shift, a line-in-the-sand for us. A rebirth.

Today we are in a little cabin on Prevelly beach, a few hours south of Perth. This campsite is special to us now - we tented here for our honeymoon, and are back for our anniversary. It's 5:30 in the morning, and Rach is still asleep. The walls of the cabin are kind of magical - they seem solid, but they let in every bit of the chill from outside, so I'm already awake. Rach of course is completely content in a 5-degree climate, but I can't feel my toes.

There is a pigeon somewhere outside, who has been releasing a slow and rhythmic chant solidly for the last hour, like a priestly mantra, covering the campsite in a resonant blessing: "whooot... whooot... whooot..." There are finches at the window, back for more breadcrumbs, and I can just hear the distant crash of the tide on rocks.

If I'm honest, it's not just my frozen toes that are keeping me awake. I'm thinking too much. And there is some fear, too. It's been a year since we married, five years all up since we even met. We stripped away all our security and careers and started a whole new life together, and it's been mind-bogglingly amazing. And impossibly hard. We started with love, a love that immediately sunk deep into our cores, and has held us together through all the things.

But in these early hours, I sometimes wonder if love is enough. This is a world of hustle and progress, where we have to make real-life grown-up decisions every day. We have to work and provide for our family, and do all the responsible life things. Am I being naive to make "love" my life's priority?

The pigeon continues to whoot, and I carefully roll myself out of bed. My toes are mutinous, avoiding the cold floorboards so that I am waddling on my heels and the sides of my feet. I penguin my way across to my shoes and pull them on, barely keeping my balance, then step out into the morning.

It's cold outside, but no colder than inside, thanks to our magical cabin walls. On this day a year ago it was not as cold, but I remember Rach and I watching the sky all day, watching the clouds gather closer and darker over our outdoor ceremony space. We would look up to the sky, and then look at each other, and then one of us would remind the other "hey, I love you," and we would agree that no, the clouds won't break our day, and that yes, we would totally do our first dance in the rain.

It did rain in the end, but later on when everyone was inside. And we did dance in the rain, just a bit, before running for cover.

The beach is only a couple of minutes walk from the cabin, not enough to actually warm up, so I find myself too soon stationary again, standing at the shoreline with arms wrapped around arms like an octopus in a straight jacket, my eyes on the horizon. I can't hear the pigeon's blessing anymore, just the ocean's soft applause, and the fizz of the tide soaking into the sand at my feet.

I stare into the horizon, a blinding white that splits the blues of ocean and sky, and send my questions across the waters:

"Have I made the right choices for my wife and kids?"
"Am I being responsible enough?"
"Am I putting too much faith in love?"
"Am I a good husband?"

In the bright silence, I wonder if there even are answers for such questions. I close my eyes and slow my breathing and try and listen anyway.

I hear the fizz of the tide. A seagull cawing overhead. The slap and crash of waves on rocks.

I hear Rach, a year ago today, reading her vows to me. She declares her security is in our love. She says she is so proud of the way we forge our lives together. She tells me I am her home, and it is a joy to build it together. She says we are a shiny mess of potential, and that we live our lives in uncertainty, and that is what allows such an exaltation of our spirits.

I hear the ocean's applause.

--

Rach finds me a little later on the front porch of our cabin. The sunlight is stronger now, but I am still wrapped in a blanket. Her toes seem completely content out here in the chill. She nuzzles her face into my neck, and then peers over to the notebook on my lap. I've copied out a page from Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet", and she smiles in recognition as she reads:

You have been told also that life is darkness...
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,
and to one another, and to God.

Tsunamis and shakti mats

A few years ago, Rach ordered a shakti mat online. She described it as a modern-day bed of nails, and was very excited about it’s arrival. I wasn’t so sure. Not because the science isn’t solid, because it is - distributed weight means less downward force means less pain - but because, at a very basic, carnal level, I don’t ever want to step, sit, or lie down on sharp pointy things. It’s just not comfortable for me to even think about.

As a kid, I stepped on a tack once. It was right under the arch of my bare foot, so it didn’t go all the way in before the pain registered, but it was enough to elicit a substantial squeal, a bucketload of tears, and a vow to never go barefoot ever again for the rest of my life. So I felt like my wariness of sharp things was at least a bit justifiable.

I remember when it arrived - a thousand tiny spikes hand stitched into what looked like a rolled-up doormat - and Rach was so excited. She danced downstairs, rolled out the mat, and promptly lay barebacked on the spikes. Her eyes went wide, and a she emitted a little gasp, but she didn’t get up. I started thinking about where the ambulance would park to most effectively collect her.

But ten minutes later, she was still on the mat, describing sensations of warmth, healing, physical restoration. I asked her if she knew where she was, and how many fingers I was holding up, but she assured me she wasn't delirious. This is just what happens with a shakti mat, she said.

Short story long, I tried it too, and yep, these mats are amazing. Because the pressure is distributed across all the tiny spikes, there’s enough pain to increase blood flow to the area, but not enough to actually break the skin and make a mess. It’s like Rach said - there’s a healing going on - something powerful and regenerative.

I think storytellers understand the power of a shakti mat. Not to heal their bodies while they write or anything like that, but in the way they distribute conflict.

In a really well-written story, the conflict is never singular. Storytellers know that if their story has only one level of conflict, then, like stepping barefoot on a single tack, it elicits too much pain for the protagonist to think about anything else. The story becomes one-dimensional: how do I find immediate relief from this pain? It's hard to hold the attention of the audience if that's all that's going on. But when the conflict is distributed across multiple levels, the story becomes richer, the protagonist draws deeper insights, and the audience is held for longer.

Take a story about a great tsunami that floods New York City, for example. Our singular conflict resides in the physical environment, and if that is the only conflict level the writer stays on, we’ll end up with a cliche action adventure full of disaster after disaster, and a cast of thousands either making it, or not making it, and an audience who may even start rooting for the wave instead of the people.

It's entertainment, but it's not meaningful. It kills the time, but there aren't really any lasting insights.

Distributing the conflict, however, would allow the writer to explore relationships, emotions, mental weakness, political failings, societal ironies, etc. This is how we connect, after all: we don't draw insights from the tsunami itself, it is how others respond to the tsunami that matters to us.

How did she manage to smile after THAT happened?
What did they do to keep their relationship so strong while THAT was going on?
Where did she find her strength in THAT moment? What made him do THAT? Why would she say THAT? How would I have dealt with that situation?

So, even in an epic tsunami movie, the writer could tell a simpler tale, perhaps with a cast of just three, and by exploring multiple levels of conflict, actually keep the audience engaged the whole way through, and come away from the story with their own insights into some of those topics.

And that's really the goal of storytelling: to hold the audience's attention, and to move the audience's hearts and minds.

But this post isn't about disaster films, or even about writing. It's about living.

I think at the core of it all, we just don’t give conflict the respect it deserves. When any discomfort comes our way, we immediately try and resolve it, remove it, avoid it. We hate discomfort. We get angry at the injustice, we feel terrified of the pain, we feel embarrassed, ashamed, abused, hurt, astonished, enraged, weak, destroyed. We feel bullied, controlled, manipulated, lost, desperate. All the things. So we put all our efforts into this one question:

"How do I find immediate relief from this pain?"

Which is an absolutely legitimate response to discomfort. In story and in life, a character will always seek to return to comfort when presented with conflict. It’s how we are wired, it’s automatic, genetic, natural.

The great tension of life and story, though, is that conflict is the vehicle that moves a character forward in their story. It’s the only way to make a character move.

Without discomfort, or conflict, a book's lead character would just stay on the couch binge-watching Netflix for twelve chapters and then the book will end, and and it won’t matter how it ends, because nobody is still reading it anyway. They’re using it to hold open a back door, or they’re scrunching the pages to get their fire started in winter.

Writers know this truth: We need conflict in our stories, in order to grow, change or move.

Which brings me back to the shakti mat, and the single tack.

If anyone steps on a single tack, and it jams itself full length into their heel, there is no space for insight, growth, or wise reflection on the discomfort. You just get that sucker out of there. The pain is intense, and the demand for relief is urgent. Nobody should "embrace" that sort of conflict.

But the pain from many tiny tacks, with all their points distributed, is not the same. The pain exists, but it is not as intense, it doesn't have the same immediacy. It allows for nuance, and healing, and learning, and change.

A writer’s challenge is to distribute the conflict. And our challenge, in living our real life stories, is to help spread that conflict out. To consider all the small pain points in our lives as pieces of our identity, artefacts of meaning. Before they get too big and sharp and urgent, we have the opportunity to work with the pain, to learn about ourselves, to choose our responses.

The pain points are there anyway, so we may as well acknowledge them all, roll out the mat of tiny spikes, and see what can be restored and healed.

Peace

When I think of peace, I think of silence. Not sounds particularly, but more an attentive quietness of mind. That space between the asking, and the answer.

Peace isn’t a boring thing, and it isn’t a forever thing. It’s a breath, a beat between moments, that point at the top of a roller coaster, where time slows and memories freeze and every single piece of existence just presents itself for inspection, as if it has all the time in the world to be taken in.

And then the rollercoaster drops, the next battle starts, the question is answered, and the whole machine of life flies into action again, all go and hustle.

And that moment, forgotten by our surface consciousness, ends up being the most memorable and nourishing morsel of the whole day.

Vulnerable Storytelling

Earlier this year, Rach and I attended a dinner event. We barely knew anybody there, but they were the kinds of people that were important to our work, so we decided to pay the $150 per ticket and just see what happens. This is often how our business life goes - We step into a space with open hearts, and see if there are connections with others. We each share stories, perspectives, ideas, and look for a fit.

It was dusk, and the restaurant overlooked the river, whose surface danced with oranges and purples, and the city lights from the far shore. We sat at a table of six, everyone looked dashing and beautiful, and the wine was paired perfectly with the seven courses. It had all the makings of a truly enjoyable and meaningful evening.

I think the way a culture evolves is very similar to the way a conversation evolves. We all start off separate, nothing to relate to, outside of our geographical setting, and then we start to talk. And the more we spend time together, the more we learn about each other, the more we discover we have in common, the more interesting the other party becomes. We start to assign value to differences, considering where in our lives their pieces can fit.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, where we each have a pocketful of pieces, we’re all slowly revealing what we have, and together finding the right fit for each piece, slowly building the masterpiece.

The first course arrives, and the conversations begin. This magical potential to add some more pieces to the great jigsaw puzzle. Rach compliments someone’s choice of earrings, asks about the story behind them. I share about my day, some of the challenges I got through to get to this moment. Across from us, a doctor shares a dramatic story of life-and-death pressures at work, while juggling a young family at home. The earrings, it turns out, were chosen because the owner loves to paint. But she can’t find the time for arting, because of her myriad other commitments of life. The doctor, it turns out, struggles with expectations, and a feeling of never being good enough.

This is the evolution. We start at the surface, we find similar experiences or feelings, we build some trust, and then we dive deeper. And as the conversations become more vulnerable, the level of connection between us grows stronger, the potential for deep insight increases, and we start to attribute this conversation to be “meaningful”, or “worthwhile”.

Absolutely worth the $300 we paid for the tickets.

The trajectory of the evening was looking great. The way things were going, we might not only find ourselves in some really deep and meaningful conversations, but we also may end up with some work collaborations in the future. It seems simple: We share our stories, we increase the vulnerability and the connection, and we land on a meaningful experience.

But, what happens if some of us as the table choose NOT to share their stories honestly? What happens if, instead of vulnerability, they share dramatic self-aggrandising stories? Or melodramatic soap operas? Or judgemental black-and-white opinions?

..

By the second course, the conversation has already commenced its downhill run on the dark path of melodrama. Two of our party, long-time friends of each other, began to share their stories. Long, detailed accounts of their own lives, monologued at a “here’s what happened” level without ever allowing insight as to what they made it mean for themselves. They were so proud of their lives, that they lost sight of anyone else’s. And, by generating such a dramatic, surface-style story energy, they were essentially demanding that we all respond with this same style of story: If anyone is to join this conversation, they must bring an equally sensational story to the table. And then we’ll all decide who’s story is better.

Rach and I went quiet. The plates came out, one after the other, and the monologues ran longer and became more sensational. We couldn’t find the space to speak, nor the energy to turn the conversation. Our pockets were still filled with our jigsaw pieces. The others in our circle had pockets filled with jigsaw pieces. And on the table was the jigsaw, with just a handful of pieces from these two conversation vampires, being swished about as if they can fill all the gaps on their own.

We left at midnight completely exhausted. The food was delicious, the guests all looked beautiful, but the conversations shattered us. Like a facebook feed, we were just bombarded with drama and self-promotion. We did not evolve that night, and it took us a week to recover.

Aristotle writes that when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence. I think he may have been referring to a decadence of ego. A story requires more than surface action: it requires vulnerability, emotion, a heart-response. Sharing our successes alone, without admitting the terrors and self-doubts and weaknesses that preceded the success, does our audience, and our culture, a great disservice.

Revealing our jigsaw pieces to the world takes courage. Sharing any part of ourselves with another is hard. But this is how we are built: The evolution of our culture, just like a meaningful story, just like my next conversation with you, requires more than the story of your success.

I need your honesty.

Is this what I feared?

“Set aside a certain number of days during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress saying to yourself all the while ‘Is this the condition that I feared?”

— Seneca, Roman Philosopher (c. 4 BC - AD 65)

Work that matters

I wrote this three years ago, but it feels right to post it here, now. It’s a slow process, doing the work you think matters, but it absolutely matters.

Jan 2018

It’s midnight, and I can’t sleep. I wish there was a great inspired reason, but to be honest, I probably had a bit too much caffeine too late in the day. So, instead of sleeping, I’m out here on the balcony of our 6th floor apartment, watching conversations on the street, and drinking whisky, and writing. A truck just drove by, loaded up with Christmas decorations. Like a giant tinsel-spider, folded up and put to rest for another year.

The world is getting back to work.

And so are we. Rach and I. We took some time out, drove 400 kilometres to the southernmost tip of Western Australia, and made our plans.

We said, “Life is not long. We have to do meaningful work”.
We said, “No matter what, we need to do work that matters.”
We took stock of what we have, and what we need to get our message out. We pooled all of our stuff, everything of value.
We climbed a mountain, and talked about Love.
Rach said the clouds felt closer up here.

Tonight Rach sold her piano.