Imagine you’re on a scenic walk and you come across a raised cliff. It stretches to the horizon in both directions and is at least as tall as you so that it poses an obstacle in your path. To proceed with your walk, you have two choices: you can take the cliff head-on and attempt to scale it in one go, or you can look around for a flight of stairs or a ramp that…
Last week I told a little story about the night my wife and I got caught in a storm on one of our date nights and had little choice but to make the most of the experience. I’ve spent the last few days thinking about this still, especially in the wake of the recent storms that have been making their way through Western Europe, because this is storm season after all. I’ve previously written how…
There is a line in a book that I come back to every few weeks, and have done so ever since I came across it a few years ago. Given the recent change in weather, with all the precipitation we’ve had this week, I’ve found myself thinking about it again, and it reminds me of one fine (but very wet) day last month. It was a Saturday in December, in the thick of the festive…
Regular readers of this blog will know that there are certain concepts I tend to come back to repeatedly because I find them fascinating. Two of these, which I hope to discuss in this post, are the concepts of the future self and our misconceived notions of failure, and their intersection. The idea that our perceptions of our future selves often influence our attitudes towards failure was planted in my mind when I read Elizabeth…
Happy New Year. It feels like yesterday when I wrote a blog post to reflect on 2023 and to say there’ll be a 2-week hiatus in my posting schedule, but here we are again. It’s the first week of 2024, and this January, like every January, I feel like I’ve been inundated with the same sort of new-year-new-me and time-to-improve-your-life messages that come around this time of year. It’s everywhere too. It’s in the mainstream…
Last December I wrote a two-part blog piece to reflect on the year 2022. In the blink of an eye, the end of the year has come around again, so I figured I’d lay the groundwork for what will hopefully become an annual tradition, and write a piece to reflect on 2023. So, what happened this year? On the writing front, as I started last year, I’ve continued to publish weekly blog posts. I’ve varied…
Millions of people across the pond, and the world over celebrated Thanksgiving the other week, and once again, we find ourselves smack in the middle of the holiday season. This is a time of year that emphasises connection, getting together with loved ones, breaking bread and drinking wine with those around us, our colleagues, our friends, our family members. I usually find myself thinking about the idea of connection during the winter months. Maybe it’s…
As I write this, we find ourselves in a peculiar time of the year. You know the one I’m talking about, when the weather turns bitterly cold, we get our first glimpse of snow, it’s dark for most of the day, and despite the subzero temperatures, the streets are awash with people out and about on a mission to eat, drink and make merry. It may seem like I’m talking about the onset of winter…
Last week I wrote about how it can sometimes be difficult to perceive progress in the moment, because progress, like a lot of other good things, tends to happen slowly over time, as opposed to bad things that tend to happen suddenly and are thus more likely to be attention-grabbing. Well, there’s hardly a more relevant example of this for me right now than the subject of this week’s post. I’ve been writing this weekly…
A few weeks ago, one of my favourite artists released an anniversary edition of one of my favourite songs. I’m talking about Passenger’s Life’s For The Living. As I listened to it, my mind was flooded with memories from when I first heard it almost ten years ago. I remembered loving the song so much that I wanted to learn how to play it, and although I knew my way around the guitar and piano…