One day soon, I will fall in the river.

Before we go any further, I’ll explain. I live in a little two-bed-terrace with my wife, my cat, and my two-year-old son. As a freelance writer working from home, the second bedroom always used to be my office – until my son took up residence there, and now it belongs to him (squatters’ rights).

The house backs onto a river, and my wife and I were talking to the landlord one day about how our son had moved into the office. The landlord offhandedly offered me a mooring if I wanted to work from a boat. Work from a boat? What an amusing notion! How silly such a thing would be. We all laughed.

So anyway, now I work from a boat. It took a while to find it, buy it, transport it. It took longer still to make it a functioning office, but now I have a desk, a chair, a place to make tea and coffee, a small fridge for the milk. I have wifi and a log-burning stove. I see mallards and swans out the window, a cormorant or heron if I’m lucky. It’s peaceful in here when it rains.

It’s all just lovely, if somewhat antithetical to the process of actually working. Much of the time I hoped to use writing has been taken up by the process of looking after the boat. Much of the money I’ve earned working aboard it has gone back into mooring fees and maintenance. Most offices don’t have the potential to sink, nor do they produce the anxiety that comes with it. Nevertheless, a boat I have.

Subscribe now

The step from the mooring onto the boat is a good couple of feet – not only down, but also across – and then I have to balance on a four-inch ledge (slippery when wet) as I unzip a canvas door, reach back to the bank for my laptop, and finally shimmy inside. It’s an awkward process, and the mooring has already claimed its first iPhone, which lies submerged to this day, forever lost to the silt of the riverbed. All of which is to say, one day soon, I will fall in the river.

And yet...

The genuine belief I will fall in the river is the very same thing that minimises its chances of happening. The certainty I’ll fall is the reason that I focus. The awareness I can be clumsy is exactly what makes me careful. And, on the flip side, believing I would never fall in the river could only increase my chances of it happening, because I wouldn’t take measures to prevent it.

There’s a French culinary phrase: mise en place, or ‘putting in place.’ It’s what you do when you prepare to cook, when you sort out the kitchen and organise what’s required ahead of time – after all, there’s little more frustrating than cooking in a messy kitchen. What I find helpful about that term is the importance it places on preparing the environment – the preparation is its own distinct part of the process.

And so, the best version of me (who occasionally rears his head) prepares for a morning’s writing the day before it begins. When I shut my laptop for the day, I close all software apart from my writing application, which I leave on, in full-screen mode, with the current project open. I schedule Do Not Disturb for the next morning and remove anything that threatens to claim my attention. This is mise en place for the laptop: clearing away the email clients and web browsers, and replacing them with only what’s needed for the task ahead. The next morning, when I sit down, there is nothing to distract me – or at least that’s the idea.

I was telling a friend about this routine. ‘Do you do that because you’re disciplined?’ he asked. I hadn’t considered this question before but I knew the answer immediately: no. And not just a normal no, but rather an absolutely-not-no, a no where the opposite is true. I don’t go through that process because I’m disciplined, but rather because I am not disciplined at all. I do it because I am terrible, because my capacity for faffing about is unmatched. I do it because I have wasted days of my life in a haze of fruitless clicks – between emails I need to reply to, the document I should be working on, and YouTube videos I never planned to watch. I cannot be trusted, and so I have learned to treat myself accordingly.

Ideas like these are far from new. The impact of environment on behaviour is well documented. At the very least, we understand notions of keeping our alarm clock on the other side of the room to force us out of bed in the morning, or setting our clocks a few minutes ahead to help us run on time. The way you arrange the world around you dictates your movement through it, and your surroundings are forever elbowing your behaviour in particular directions.

What then of falling in the river? The care I take to avoid it has less to do with the environment and more to do with a kind of mental mistrust of myself. I do this all the time. I genuinely presume I’ll burn the toast, which means I tend not to burn the toast. I always believe I will misplace my keys, so I generally know where they are. The constant awareness of my own potential for failure minimises its actual occurrence. I think of this as the Paradox of Mistrust: the less and less I trust myself, the more I can be trusted.

That’s interesting to me. Is there a meaningful distinction between keeping my poor discipline in check, and being disciplined in the first place? The outcome is certainly the same. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still an oaf, I still get distracted, and freelance life is a never-ending struggle against my default state of sitting on the sofa, playing video games, and eating too much chocolate, but trusting myself less has somehow led me to trust myself a little bit more.

My father will occasionally be told he has a remarkable memory, but he’s dismissive of this, annoyed even. ‘I haven’t got a good memory,’ he says. ‘I just write things down.’ But this is the Paradox of Mistrust, and somehow both things are true at the same time: he does not have a remarkable memory and yet he sort of does, because the acts of a man who believes he’ll forget are the acts of a man who remembers.

There’s an important caveat here though. I’m not offering this as advice; I’m only observing my own tendencies. Advice can often be packaged for the masses at the expense of the individual, and besides – as my good friend Joe once said – advice is only good if you agree with it.

So this may not be for you, and that’s fine. What I’m talking about here is, I suspect, entirely dependent on one’s own temperament. Excessive focus on the ways in which things might go wrong may not be such a good idea for a person prone to anxiety. Attempting to mitigate every possible misstep is not something you’d recommend to a person prone to neuroticism. But the key, for me at least, is to contain the awareness of potential failure to my own behaviour, my own actions. Tone is important too, because there’s a risk this practice descends into catastrophizing, self-loathing, or both. So the invitation here is not to panic or be unkind to yourself, but rather to identify a tendency and treat it as an entity: pop the behaviour in a bell jar. There’s an important, compassionate difference between being prone to idiocy, and identifying as an idiot.

It still seems a little negative though, right? A constant awareness of all the ways in which we might go wrong? That doesn’t sound like a pleasant mental space to occupy. But for me, there’s a kind of lightness to it, of meeting yourself where you are. The truly unpleasant mental state is the one where we trust ourselves to be better and must repeatedly deal with the frustration and disappointment of discovering we are not. Over time, that takes its toll.

And so I prefer this approach: I don’t presume I’ll be better, I presume I’ll be just as I am. This is a Taoist kind of vibe, aligning with a problem rather than battling against it, using acceptance as a means to free energy, and then spending that energy well.

So I expect to burn the toast. I know I’ll lose my keys. And when I do fall in the river, I’ll be ready.

Subscribe now

Here are five things my two-year-old son has reminded me about life as an adult human.

One.
He splashes in puddles, chases the cat, and squelches his food in his hands. We like it when the world responds. It’s how we know we’re here.

Two.
He gets irate when he’s hungry (as we all do), overwhelmed when he’s tired (as we all do), and just wants to curl up in a blanket when he’s ill (as we all do, Fred – as we all do).

Three.
He can’t be reasoned out of a bad mood. You can’t suggest his emotional response might be disproportionate to the situation at hand (and neither does this work well on adults). He can be distracted from sorrow, or he can endure it – just like the rest of us.

Four.
He gets annoyed when his towers collapse. There’s a gap between what he can do, and what he wishes he could do. That gap is a source of much frustration. That gap never goes away.

Five.
Everything’s just a phase – we say this often of children. It takes on a different meaning as we grow up, as character sets in its mould, but it remains as true as it ever was. Everything’s just a phase.

Subscribe now

I’m inventing a new word. I do this tentatively, since new words are generally pretty awful. Brexit. Situationship. Jeggings.

I fully support the existence of these words, mind you. As culture evolves so too does its language, and so there comes a point when the old words aren’t enough anymore, as our lives slowly but inevitably outgrow the vocabulary we have to describe them. I passionately defend the evolution of language. I believe new words can and must exist, and that there’s no escaping it, and that even existing words will shift and change, since the meanings of words are not fixed, as Wittgenstein said, but rather they are fluid and defined by how we collectively use them. But just because I believe all that – and I do – doesn’t mean I have to like the word bromance.

So why am I being so dramatic? Why do I think a new word is necessary? And who the hell do I think I am coining it? First of all, calm down. I’m only inventing it for the purposes of this essay, and just because I’m going to use it, doesn’t mean you have to. Also, if you read no further, you’ll never even have to know what the word is, and you can’t say fairer than that.

The new word has to do with beginnings and where they hide. There’s the traditional beginning, of course – Beginning with a big ‘B’, formal by nature – which will happen once and only ever at the start. But then there are the smaller beginnings, the informal ones that we need after we’re interrupted by a phone call, or someone walking in the room when we weren’t expecting it, or, and probably most frequently, whenever our minds have wandered a bit. We may have Begun with a big ‘B’ an hour ago, but is that really an hour’s work? How many times did we have to start again along the way?

This is where I need to get a bit more specific, because it’s not like the idea of beginning again is in any way unique, but that notion – ‘beginning again’ – tends to feel somewhat heavy. Certainly, when we talk of ‘new beginnings,’ we’re generally talking about larger, more significant shifts in our personal circumstances. A new job, or a new relationship, or moving to another area. Similarly, we might ‘start from scratch’ or ‘turn over a new leaf’ or ‘wipe the slate clean’ – all of which are forms of beginning again, but all of which are similarly dramatic, and none of which I personally have the energy for. Most importantly, none of those terms let you carry on with whatever you were doing in the first place – they are big ‘B’ Beginnings, focussing on change over continuity. But what about the smaller beginnings, the ones that hide in the middles?

You can already ‘carry on’ or ‘continue,’ of course, but there’s no interruption implicit in those terms. Just because you’re continuing, doesn’t mean you stopped. ‘Restart’ is a little close to ‘reset,’ both of which carry connotations of going backwards to some prior state, rather than forwards, where progress lies. I have particular needs here. I want a word that acknowledges a setback, and allows us to keep going just as we were beforehand.

There’s an old Irish folk song called Finnegan’s Wake. It’s a song that tells the story of an alcoholic called Tim Finnegan, who falls from a ladder, cracks his skull and dies. His wake gets so rowdy that a mourner hurls a bucket of whiskey across the room. It splashes over Tim Finnegan’s corpse, who wakes with the wonderful line, ‘Thundering Jesus, do you think I’m dead?’

The author James Joyce, borrowing somewhat from the song, later wrote the formidable Finnegans Wake (the same title, less the apostrophe) which, after six hundred pages, famously ends mid-sentence and loops back to the book’s opening words.

More familiar to most of us is the children’s song about an old fella called Michael Finnegan, who grew whiskers on his chinnegan only for the wind to come out and blow them in again. Poor old Michael Finnegan (begin again).

Three Finnegans then, all of whom begin again. And the nature of these beginnings is more rooted in continuity than change – these Finnegans stop, then return to where they were, and they continue – which is exactly what we’ll be discussing here. So, for all my talk of a new word, it might be more accurate to say I’m repurposing an existing one. The word ‘finnegan’ (we’ll go lower-case ‘F’ to distinguish it from the name) already carries the relevant associations, and so, for the purposes of this post, to finnegan is to begin again, not in any dramatic sense, but rather to notice we have stopped, to regroup, and then to keep doing whatever we were doing to begin with.

For me, this idea is rooted in my own writing practice, where failures of focus are common, where I may sit down with the best intentions yet nevertheless find myself distracted by something shiny twenty minutes later. This is a finnegan, and there are two aspects I’d like to unpack, contradictory in nature, which we’ll call The First Thing and The Second Thing.

The First Thing is recognising that stopping and starting again is natural. This taps into an idea that’s reared its head before on this blog: the stuff that seems to get in the way of something is often just a byproduct of engaging with it in the first place. The inherent consequence of trying to achieve anything remotely complex is to be met with obstacles that prevent it.

This is Alan Watts, in his talk Coincidence of Opposites:

[...] any experience that we have through our senses—whether of sound, or of light, or of touch—is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects: one called “on,” and the other called “off.” [...] For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter in life people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they are, at the same time, one.

And so it goes when you engage with a task. The crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. The obstacle is part of the process, not a barrier to it – it is evidence of engagement, not of defeat.

So that’s The First Thing – acceptance. Nothing is truly continuous. We’re all of us vibrations, on and then off, stopping then starting. The positive and the negative are one. The unavoidable consequence of attempting to focus is, at some point, to lose focus. It’s just the way things are, so we shouldn’t waste energy fighting that notion. We’d be far better off accepting it.

But The Second Thing, contradictory in a way I make absolutely no apologies for, is that we should not accept it. We should seek to do one thing at a time, to give it our full attention, and to minimise that which distracts us.

The world of social psychology gives us the term ‘time affluence’ – the study of how much free time people feel like they have. The modern-day narrative is about how we’re all busier than ever, but time-use research does study this beyond mere generalities. There’s nuance here – class, gender, parental status, and what actually counts as ‘leisure’ time – but the trend is that most modern societies increasingly gained leisure time from the 1960s all the way through to the mid-2000s, at which point it levelled off, where it has remained without decline ever since. Individually – who can say? – you may very well be busier than ever. But collectively, we really aren’t. We’re about as busy as we ever were. That may not seem like the ‘hot take’ you’re looking for, but it’s actually a more interesting state of affairs because the question changes from, ‘Why are we all so busy?’ to, ‘Why do we feel so busy?’

One answer can be found in a wonderful term coined by author and journalist Brigid Schulte: time confetti. Time confetti relates to the increasingly disjointed way in which we spend our free time. We may have plenty of spare minutes, but the more splintered and disconnected they are, the more meaningless they become. How easily our spare minutes fill with a YouTube video, the checking of email, a scroll on social media. How rare to combine those minutes into a solid hour of doing something with intention. We’re all thread and no cloth, our time too fragmented to be meaningful. All of which is to say that too many stop-starts – too many finnegans – will scatter our time to the wind. Spending an hour at work is not necessarily the same thing as actually working for an hour. Indeed, it’s surprising how often they are separate activities.

For some of us, it’s difficult to know when we’ve stopped doing the thing we intended to. It’s tricky to identify the precise moment that led us away from the task at hand. All we can say for sure is that fifteen minutes ago we were writing and now we’re sat there, phone in hand, having fallen yet again into the bottomless well of never-ending online content. But if we think, we can trace it back. We picked up our phone because we wanted to check our bank balance, which we felt compelled to do because someone in an email said an invoice had been paid. We checked our email because we hit a snag on our primary task, and so we wanted a way of avoiding it that would, on some level, allow us to claim we really were still working, your honour. We followed the path of least resistance and now the algorithm is working its magic, feeding us content we do not need but cannot hope to resist.

Buddhist scriptures speak of Mara – a demon who tricks people into giving up, or doing the thing they shouldn’t. Mara is cunning, difficult to spot, and most go about their lives oblivious to his existence, but Buddha would often say, ‘Mara, I see you.’ Because to see the demon – to see the delusion – is to take away its power. It’s not easy. It requires the ability to see and understand ourselves with real clarity. Buddhists have a word for this self-monitoring – sampajañña. English translations differ on exactly what it means, but it’s something like ‘clear comprehension’ or ‘full awareness.’ It’s a simple idea but it’s the work of a lifetime.

Motivations are subtle, as Buddhist scholar Joseph Goldstein says. To illustrate the point, he tells the simple story of the time he gave a piece of fruit to a young beggar in India. The beggar took the fruit and walked away, without so much as a nod, barely acknowledging him at all, and Goldstein found himself affected by this – after all, a little thanks wouldn’t go amiss. That was interesting to Goldstein. He had thought his motivation was solely to help the beggar, but if that were true then the only thing that should have mattered was the act of giving the fruit, and the beggar’s response should have been irrelevant. His motivation, he reflected, was more elusive than pure charity – it involved himself more than he had previously understood.

Most of us aren’t even looking for our own motivations, let alone seeking to understand them. Of course we have to check our emails – that’s our job. But if we slow down and look a little closer, we may see the truth of it: we didn’t really think it was important to check our email, rather we were struggling with the task we were doing prior. Later, we’ll tell ourselves the story of how our day was simply too busy to make progress on the difficult task, when in fact we were secretly looking for reasons to avoid it. Mara tricked us, and we were deceived. For me, even the act of writing this post – I notice as I sit here – is a distraction from another piece of writing I should be prioritising. Motivations are subtle.

One tiny, bad decision is all it takes to trigger the Rube Goldberg machine, sending the marble of our attention spiralling into increasingly impressive detours. So the goal is to watch that marble, to keep an eye on ourselves, to pay attention to our inclination to stop or do something else, and to notice exactly how much discomfort triggers that impulse. All of which ultimately means increasing our tolerance for staying with a problem. In the wonderful book Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Carlson takes one of his own short stories and breaks down the process he went through to write it, part of which involves him dealing with his own impulses to stop. This is him:

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room.

I think most writers will recognise the temptation to ‘leave the room,’ and this represents the other side of the problem: not only will we find an easier route when faced with discomfort, but if we actually succeed in making any progress at all, we believe we’ve earned a break. We are hopeless. But I like Carlson’s advice, although the precise framing is a little dated today. Carlson was writing this at a time when the TV was the main source of distraction, and notice how it’s at least in another room. Ron Carlson Writes a Story was released in 2007, the same year as the first iPhone, at a time when average home internet speeds were around 3 Mbps, but the philosophy holds, and I like it just the same: the writer is the person who stays in the room. Or, as put it more recently: Open the document, stay in the document.

Ok. So let’s say we’re paying closer attention to our own patterns of thought and action – we’re cultivating our sampajañña, learning how to see Mara, looking out for finnegans. That’s all great, but how do we actually begin again? How do we make progress on the thing we’re struggling with and secretly avoiding? Here I turn to the work of Dr. Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist who specialised in procrastination, and whose work I’ve referenced here before. His advice to begin a task you’ve been putting off works just as well for returning to a task you left behind, and it’s this: find the smallest way to begin. You don’t have to begin the big daunting document you’ve promised, but you can find the email that outlines what’s required. And so the task is not ‘write the big daunting document,’ but rather, ‘find the relevant email.’ Well, we can certainly do that. And once we’ve found it, we may as well read it, and once we’ve read it, we may as well think about it, and since we’re thinking about it, we may as well write those thoughts down, and so on.

I’m unsure if Pychyl named this concept, but I’ve started thinking of this as the Smallest Identifiable (unit of) Progress. Yes, I’ve given it caps, and I’m going to cautiously abbreviate it too – in a way that seems a little bit corporate and makes me feel slightly nauseous – but you see, the Smallest Identifiable Progress is a SIP, which seems fitting. We’re not downing the whole thing. It’s a tiny, little slurp of a tea too hot to gulp.

Ron Carlson says two things will help you stay in the room: ‘staying specific and not stopping.’ So it goes with a sip. A sip, too, must be specific, but crucially it must never, ever be difficult. Whenever I find myself struggling, the goal is not to make the work good, but to make progress easy – because the easier progress becomes, the better the work will be. This is about prioritising momentum over quality, and minimising the friction that causes me to stop, because the ultimate goal of learning to spot finnegans is counterintuitive – it’s to see as few of them as possible. I don’t want to stop, nor do I want to be faced with beginning again. I just want to keep going.

It’s the consistency of the small action that gets us through, not the drama of the larger one. The pomp and ceremony of a wedding day is not what makes a relationship – it’s smaller, more specific kindnesses that will sustain it. The grand declaration you’re writing a novel might give you enough incentive to blast through the opening two chapters, but it won’t get you through the agony of noticing the plot holes and motivational flaws once you’re twenty thousand words in.

Everything worthwhile is made from something smaller, so the goal becomes – just for the moment – focussing on the small thing, not the large; the bricks and not the house. I can’t really write a book – that’s absurd. But I can write one sentence and then another, and I can notice the impulse to stop but continue anyway. I can stay in the room. A piece of writing is only ever the consequence of a thousand tiny decisions, all stacked up together. And even when I stray – and I will – that’s not a setback, that’s just a finnegan. That’s an on-off, a stop-start, a natural part of the process. It’s the bucket of whiskey hurled at my corpse, the invitation to wake up and begin again.

Thundering Jesus, do you think I’m dead?

(You’ve been reading How To Begin, Part 2. Here’s How To Begin, Part 1.)

Last week I attended my two-year-old son’s Christmas Concert. ‘Concert’ is a generous term here, since some of the performers can barely walk, plenty can’t yet form coherent sentences, and, while many can sing, there’s nobody you’d exactly call a musician, but we’ll allow it regardless – a concert it is.

This was my second of these concerts, and it’s always great fun. The nursery takes over a nearby sports hall for the afternoon, and they deck the hall with, not quite boughs of holly, but with Christmas trees and cotton wool snow, and dazzling quantities of fairy lights. The children and staff alike don their Christmas outfits, and the staff do their utmost to remind the children of the words and actions to songs they’ve spent weeks rehearsing. In that sense, you could technically call it a failure, since few of the children show signs of having rehearsed anything, and instead spend their time happily bemused at the spectacle of it all, just generally delighted to be dressed up as elves and Santas, watching the crowds for their parents. In one narrow sense then, a failure; in every other sense, utterly joyous.

Afterwards, the staff turn on the main lights and begin the process of clearing away the decorations. They leave gym mats out for the children to play on, and provide alcohol and nibbles for the parents. A particular kind of chaos ensues.

There are children so young they can’t yet walk, and children whose enthusiasm for walking doesn’t quite match up to their actual ability. There are more experienced walkers who delight in demonstrating their unique brand of Runscreaming™ around the hall, and older siblings playing football with baubles. There’s an occasional hobbling grandparent, and then there are the parents themselves trying to prevent catastrophes with a drink in one hand and a mince pie in the other. To borrow a line from Neil Hannon: all human life is here.

Some here are steady, others erratic, some are fast while others are slow, and the speed at which a person moves does not necessarily dictate their temperament – fast movers might be steady, and the slow may be erratic. You need your wits about you to navigate an environment like this.

Surprisingly, despite the constant apologies and narrowly averted disasters, everyone is in good spirits. Maybe it’s the shared experience of raising a child – a collective eye-roll for the young – or maybe it’s just the free prosecco. Either way, there is no trace of anger in this hall. We all know what the deal is and we’d be fools to presume otherwise.

And this is how I’ve started thinking about driving a car. I’m aware that’s a bit of a leap from a toddlers’ Christmas Concert, but bear with me. We’ll detour and come back.

Anger wants somewhere to go. If I bang my head on a cupboard door someone else left open, that’s ideal because I have somewhere to direct my rage. I love nothing more than blaming my wife when things like this happen, no matter how tenuous the fault. ‘Did you leave this cupboard door open‽’ – lovely bit of blame. It’s me who’s the victim, my wife who’s the issue, and my world view remains comfortably intact. Perfect. If, however, I bang my head on a cupboard door that I left open, then that’s a struggle. The anger can’t really go anywhere – and heaven forbid I’m just a clutz – so it’s a more difficult experience to process because, in general, whenever life is frustrating, notice how the problem is always the same: other people.

That’s why it’s emotionally challenging to drive a car on busy roads. You’re a pretty good driver, if you do say so yourself. The problem is all the other drivers. Or, as George Carlin invited us to notice, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac. All of which is to say, there’s no shortage of outlets for your anger on the roads: fools abound.

But this is what it means to drive. There are those who block the way and prevent you from driving at a reasonable speed, and then there are those who recklessly overtake because you’re so unbearably slow. And how do we react to situations like these? Anger and judgment – it’s there in a flash: ‘What kind of cretin could drive like that?’ If we manage to overtake said cretin on the motorway, it becomes incredibly important that we see their face – a deep need to confirm our judgement of this person. Ah yes, we think as we glance their way, truly the face of a dickhead.

And somehow all of this is a shock to us, as if we expected the perfect journey, as if, on some level, we believe everyone else should drive exactly as we expect them to. But we’ve been around. We shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter these hazards, because we are navigating an environment defined by them. And that’s where the Christmas Concert comes in. We all know what the deal is and we’d be fools to presume otherwise. As in that sports hall, so too on the roads: all human life is here. There are kids not yet twenty, so young they’re invincible, and drivers so old they’re no longer safe.

This is not, I should clarify, an invitation to think more compassionately of other drivers, though you’re welcome to. I used to ‘think the best’ of those who drove dangerously: maybe it’s an emergency, maybe they’re on their way to the hospital. Or maybe they’ve just passed their test and they’re still a little bit anxious. It’s a preferable response, for sure, since compassion tends to negate the nastier impulse to judge, but the issue, I find, is that it takes a lot of energy to fight against your natural emotional response, and I’m not convinced you’re really fooling anybody when you try to. The kindness of ‘maybe it’s an emergency’ is really just covering up the fury of ‘what an absolute twat’ – it’s anger wearing glasses and a bad fake moustache.

Instead, I’ve been finding it helpful to frame the whole experience as simply an environment to navigate. What does that mean? Well, if I’m hiking through the forest, I’m looking out for roots I may trip over, branches I must duck under, patches of mud I might slip on. Of course I’m looking out for these things, and it’s not a big deal when I encounter them: it’s the nature of the trail. Or say I’m playing a video game. I don’t expect to reach the end of a mission without encountering obstacles – that’s the whole point of the game. Or, if I’m mingling after my son’s Christmas Concert, I’m alert to the very real possibility of a tiny elf running into my shins. There’s no judgement involved in any of these scenarios. I’m just reacting to the situation as best I can.

So what’s the difference here? Why are we fine slowing down to navigate a tricky patch of woodland footpath, yet so angry applying the brakes for the car in front? There are, of course, clear and easy targets for our anger on the roads – other humans to get upset with – and, to any sane person at least, a protruding forest root can never truly be a moron. And that, I think, gets us closer to something a little bit deeper.

The event and its cause are not the same thing.

We conflate the two because they’re so closely related, but having to unexpectedly apply the brakes when I’m driving (the event – the quantifiable impact on my life) is not the same thing as the driver in front signalling late (the cause – that which necessitated my response). In spite of the causality, they are distinct occurrences. I’m not really upset about having to break – that’s not a big deal – I’m annoyed with the driver in front. Or rather, I’m not angry at the event itself, I’m angry at its cause.

We have a tendency, I think, to direct anger at causes more than the events themselves. That’s why I’m never going to get upset at a protruding forest root, even if I trip over it – there’s no clear cause for the root having grown in the way it did. The tree just exists. It’s part of the environment. That’s all.

I get angry when I hit my head on a cupboard door because some part of me believes it shouldn’t be part of my environment, and I should exist in a world where the cupboard door is always safely closed. But if I expect to bang my head on a cupboard door say once a year, then its occurrence is softened on account of it being just my annual head bang.

Seneca called this premeditatio malorum – the premeditation of evils. It’s the act of contemplating adversity in advance, with the aim of better equipping us to deal with frustrations when they arise, and I think it’s also worthwhile estimating their frequency too. I might own a favourite mug, on average, for seven years before it chips or breaks. I’ll lose my phone, or have it stolen, once every ten or fifteen years, perhaps. On my local roads, I can expect to encounter approximately one dangerous driving manoeuvre for every half-an-hour driving. When I set off on my journey, I may not know when I will encounter this danger, but if I know it’s out there somewhere, I’m not as upset when I inevitably find it.

I’m still working on this, mind you. If I’m out walking with my son and a car screeches around a residential corner at a speed that would kill him, the anger is still there – I can’t stop it. Similarly, if you’re ever involved in a car accident, that’s just plain scary – all bets are off and you’ll react how you will. But these are, I hope, exceptions.

So this is how I drive a car – or try to, at least. It’s an environment to navigate. Pedestrians may act like the roads are for them, and cyclists may cycle as if daring cars to hit them, but these hazards are no different from the protruding root on the forest trail: they just exist. That’s all. Bad drivers are not driving badly at me; they are out there already, driving badly whether I’m there or not. And if I can hang onto that, if I can remember the nature of the environment, and if I can react to the event rather than its cause, then I find the anger evaporates. I feel no need to get upset, nor to fake kind responses. I can let go of judgment altogether and move on without wasting silly amounts of energy on strangers I’ll forget in five minutes’ time.

And, for what it’s worth, this way of thinking can also be useful in navigating the heavily crowded aisles of a peak-time Tesco supermarket.

The Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes speak of the future as if it’s behind them. They gesture in front of themselves when they speak of the past, and backwards when they speak of the future. To the Aymara people, the past is nayra – which means sight or front – and the future is q’ipa – behind or back.

Strange to us, but an equally valid perception of our movement through time, since we can’t see where we’re going but we can see where we’ve been. The Aymara word for tomorrow, q’ipüru, means ‘some day behind one’s back.’ A day you cannot yet see.

This is a post about ideas. And, in the same way we picture our future, I think we tend to imagine new ideas somewhere ahead of us. That’s perfectly natural, since new ideas don’t exist yet, but, just for the purposes of this post, I’d like us to turn around for a moment, like the Aymara people, and look behind us instead, at the life we have lived, the books we have read, the art we have enjoyed. I’d like to propose that the ideas we seek are back where we have come from, not forwards where we’re going.

The iPhone changed the world. A big touchscreen as the main interface. No physical keyboard. Apps. But none of this was anything new and, in fact, such a phone had already been invented, in 1994, thirteen years before the iPhone was released. It was a portable phone with a big touchscreen as the main interface, no physical keyboard, and apps for – among other things – email, calendar and notes. It was called The Simon and it was made by IBM. Nobody bought it. It was heavy, calls were expensive, and the battery only lasted an hour. But it did exist. And the point here is not that the iPhone wasn’t innovative, but rather to take a closer look at what it even means to ‘innovate’ in the first place, because everything that comprised the iPhone already existed.

And if you think about it, that’s obvious. How else can you make anything? You can’t invent something new with components that don’t exist. A chef isn’t trying to discover unknown ingredients. A musician isn’t looking for brand new notes. To create is to combine, to rearrange existing elements into something that transcends them. And even this is not a new observation. Steve Jobs himself said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something.’

They just saw something. Or, in other words, they paid attention. ‘Creativity starts with attention,’ as says, and I like that thought because it takes a process which seems mysterious and makes it more concrete. It’s not the whole process, of course, but my experience – having spent my life surrounded by creative people – is that they notice more about whatever they’re interested in. And this noticing starts a process, since people who pay attention more will better remember things later. Noticing feeds memory, and memory feeds creativity, since you have more points of reference – let’s call it a well-stocked pantry from which to cook your meal.

So if creativity starts with attention, what exactly do we pay attention to? That’s the easy part, because you pay attention to whatever you want. You pay attention to what you love, what you’re interested in. And notice how you don’t need to choose what you’re interested in. It’s automatic. It comes from some place deep within you, and may, in some way, even be the essence of who you are. Pay attention for long enough and you’ll develop something else all creative people have – taste.

But taste, as has written, is more than preference. It’s knowledge. It’s not possible, Oliver says, to have ‘good taste’ in wine if you don’t know anything about it. This is him:

Having good taste in wine means being able to identify what you are drinking, being able to distinguish various grapes and regions; similarly, having good taste in art means knowing what you are reading, watching, or hearing.

Sure, you can say, ‘I prefer that wine,’ but that’s not the same thing as your taste in wine until you start paying attention to what it is about ‘that wine’ that you enjoy, and the only way to do that is to understand how it differs from other wines – wines that you don’t enjoy. That’s important. It’s difficult to have taste if you only ever experience what you love. Or rather, if you only eat at McDonald’s, I’m not too interested in your opinion on food.

But hang on a minute. Creative people pay attention to whatever they enjoy, whatever they’re drawn towards, and yet also manage to pay attention to what they don’t enjoy. There’s a seeming contradiction there, because why would anyone pay deliberate attention to that which they dislike? Well, I suspect it’s impossible not to, and so I think the contradiction takes care of itself.

Let’s imagine you’ve got a keen interest in gangster films. If your interest is strong enough, you’ll watch any gangster film you can find. But – even in a scenario where you’re trying to exclusively target films you enjoy – you cannot avoid films you won’t like, because your verdict on a film will only be known to you once you’ve watched it. It’s obvious, but intriguing, because it means the natural result of taking a deep enough interest in a field you love is to expose yourself to that which you loathe. But this is a good thing. Taste is a spectrum of loving and loathing and all the in-betweens.

The wellspring that feeds all of this – attention, taste, knowledge, love – is curiosity. There is no such thing as a creative person who is not curious. In the field of ideas, curiosity and creativity are very nearly synonymous. Each feeds the other and – contrary to what we might have been taught – it doesn’t matter which comes first.

A tired piece of advice for would-be writers says that if you want to write, you should first read. Yeah, but why? Education is not a prerequisite for creativity. My two-year-old happily paints but knows almost nothing of the work of Cézanne. Sure, it’s perfectly possible that if you read enough, you’ll want to write. But I’d say it’s more likely that if you have a strong enough desire to write, you’ll naturally start reading more. The order is unimportant. The creative urge can absolutely come first, and will unavoidably feed curiosity about the work of others. The advice for would-be writers could just as easily be: if you want to write, you should first write. In fact, I prefer that version.

Curiosity then. And if the curiosity burns with all the force of an obsession, it will be very difficult not to have new thoughts. You cannot help but connect different ideas in a field you are fixated by. And let’s remind ourselves here that we’re not looking for brand new ingredients – we are only trying to combine existing ingredients in a new way. Popular culture and lingering myths from the Renaissance would have us believe that ideas somehow ‘pop’ into existence, a gift from the muse to the chosen few. Funny how such ideas only ever find those who were looking for them in the first place.

Inspiration isn’t magic. As Natalie Goldberg reminds us in Writing Down the Bones, inspire means literally ‘to breathe in.’ It’s just paying the right kind of attention to what already exists. And the inhale, of course, informs the exhale. Writing is so much easier when I remind myself it’s ok to simply share whatever I’ve noticed. For a surprising amount of my life, that’s all I’m ever really doing anyway.

Looking forwards for new ideas is pointless. We’ll never find them – they’re not there yet. The answers we seek are back where we’ve been, or they’re around us in the present. I find that thought comforting. I feel, at the very least, like I’m not scrambling around in the dark, wondering what the right answer might eventually become. I can put that question to bed entirely, since I have no way of answering it. But I can look for clues in what’s already been created. I can look behind me. I can look around. I can breathe in.

It’s easy, I think, to misremember the specifics of Twelve Angry Men. I certainly did. I had a vague notion of the plot, of one dissenting jury member convinced he was right, aggressively arguing the case, determined to prove the others wrong. But that’s not really what happens, and in fact such a recollection arguably misses the whole point. While eleven jury members are certain the man on trial is guilty, the lone dissenter, Juror #8, has doubt. The only thing that sets him apart from the others is that he’s just not sure. Juror #8’s superpower is uncertainty in the face of conviction.

Well, I say ‘superpower.’ While it’s an admirable quality in the context of the movie, in real life this trait can be infuriating to those who know you (so I hear, so I hear). If a friend preaches the life-changing benefits of a new vitamin supplement, there is no way to be sceptical without also being offensive. If I question the legitimacy of the wonder-pill, then I also question the belief and intelligence of the person who takes it, and the clear implication is that I think I know better. Horrible. But I’m Juror #8, you see. It’s not that I know better, it’s that I know less. Is there a difference between disagreeing and expressing doubt? I feel like there should be. In practice, it’s less clear cut.

TLC’s 1999 hit single, No Scrubs, opens with the lyric: A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly / And is also known as a busta. I like that. It’s academic. The term is defined before it’s explored, and so later in the song when TLC tell us they don’t, in fact, want any scrubs, we know exactly what they mean. In the same spirit, and before we go any further, I feel we should define the term we’re exploring in this post: doubt.

But alas, we cannot be quite so succinct as TLC, for doubt is something of a chameleon, changing in accordance with its surroundings. If I doubt in my own ability, then I lack confidence. If I doubt my favoured outcome will happen, I’m anxious. If I doubt which course of action to take, I’m stagnant. All of which sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. Hold that thought for me – or pop it in a pocket – and we’ll return to it later. Juror #8’s doubt, however, is none of those things – it is not insecure or troubled, rather we could say it’s synonymous with scepticism, since doubt can also be rigorous and investigatory. It can concern itself with specifics and pay attention to detail. Juror #8 is also – and this is significant, I think – content with not knowing the truth. He never reaches a point where he has certainty, rather he remains dogged in his insistence that there is none. While this aspect of the film is more a commentary on the American justice system, I think we can broaden it out a little. After all, to ask a jury ‘guilty or not guilty’ is essentially to ask whether they are ‘certain or uncertain’ – and that’s a useful question for us all.

Most of us – including me, of course – don’t want much to do with uncertainty. We prefer to either understand something or dismiss it altogether. Spending too much time between yes and no is uncomfortable to contemplate, like an invitation you can’t decline to an event you won’t attend. We don’t like sitting in that space – the in between, the not-knowing of things – and so parents speculate where you picked up that nasty cold, sports pundits weave stories around natural variance in athletes’ performances, and the population at large more readily reaches for conspiracy theories at times of greatest uncertainty. When faced with events too nuanced, complex or outright random to fully grasp, we’ll make up whatever stories we must to give ourselves a feeling of control. You picked up that cold at the pub, the football team simply lacks belief, and 5G masts caused the pandemic. So let’s explore for a while what it means to neither accept nor dismiss, to embrace the not-knowing, to ‘live the questions,’ as Rilke once wrote.

I’m hesitant to offer any additional commentary on the topic of A.I, but it makes for a good example here. Depending on who you pay attention to, you may hear that A.I progression is already levelling off and the technology is about as good as it’s going to get, at least for the foreseeable future. Or, pay attention elsewhere, and you’ll hear that A.I is on track to become an alien-like super-intelligence that threatens humanity’s very existence by 2027. Spend enough time down the A.I rabbit hole and it’s impossible not to get swept away in the tsunami of endless hypotheses. The best way to remain sane, I’ve found, is to remember what we’re doing when we talk about the future of A.I: we are guessing. I don’t say that to quash sensible, evidence-based analysis, nor do I wish to undermine how impressive many of the people are who engage in these discussions. I call it ‘guessing’ because, for me, that’s the healthiest way to think about it. We don’t know, and so we are guessing. It’s a statement so obvious that I’m reluctant to even point it out, and yet somehow it feels easy to lose sight of among the commotion. For our purposes, A.I is comparable to 9/11 or COVID-19, insofar as it represents a deep global uncertainty. We know this technology seems hugely significant, but we don’t know how it will evolve, or the consequences of its evolution. This uncertainty is precisely why there’s such a furore. We cannot sit comfortably in our not-knowing. We are uneasy.

I don’t know. In a world where even the thumbnails shout at us, it can be difficult to reach this realisation, but we can learn to develop an awareness for it, and we can get better in time. Note that not-knowing is not the same thing as not caring, nor does it prevent us from having an opinion or making decisions, but rather it’s developing a keener eye for our self-deceptions, and recognising that voices – both inside and outside our heads – have a tendency to get louder in the face of uncertainty. If we can acknowledge our own not-knowing, maybe we can greet those voices with more clarity.

Ok, so while that may be a healthy approach when dealing with the noise of social media, it seems problematic in the workplace. As a freelance writer, often in the world of video games and TV, people don’t pay me to be uncertain, and if my answer to every question was, ‘I don’t know,’ I’d pretty soon be out of work. Like most people, I do need to know things to earn money. My job tends to be collaborative and frequently involves generating new ideas or expressing opinions on existing ones. The Juror #8 approach, in this context, is unthinkable. I cannot helpfully contribute to a discussion by expressing doubt about every new idea. If everyone else is building a tower, I can’t keep knocking it down. Over the years, I’ve developed instincts and taste, and I’ve learned how to verbalise what’s in my head (more or less), which are necessary skills in my line of work. On the face of it, it would seem like there’s little room here for not-knowing, and yet it is vital, because another necessary skill is to recognise when I’m wrong. To create is to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time: your ideas are worthwhile, and your ideas might be bad. If you don’t think they’re worthwhile, you’ve no reason to pursue them. If you don’t know when they’re bad, you’ve no way of improving them. The nuance here, the true skill, is knowing when to shift between these states – when to believe the idea is good, when to suspect it’s bad – or when to kill it altogether. Underlying much of the creative process, at least in the messy middle stages, is often a queasy uncertainty, a fear the whole thing might be terrible. But that feeling, that not-knowing, doesn’t obstruct the creative act, rather it is a by-product of it. It is evidence you are creating.

Not-knowing is not always easy, and it’s proportionate to the severity of the situation that faces us. Health concerns can mean waiting first for an appointment, then the referral, scan, and results, the prognosis and the treatment, likely followed by ongoing monitoring – more appointments, scans, results. Every step of the process requires us to wait while contemplating questions to which there are no answers yet. That’s a lot of doubt to live with, and when it’s you or someone you love, that weighs heavy. Even when there’s less at stake, it’s hard to have no answers. What will they think of your presentation? Why has nobody replied to your email yet? We fill in the blanks with a world we’ve made up, fighting an endless tug-of-war between the world as it is and the world as it might be. This tug-of-war is an exhausting battle we will never win, and if we ever get too tired of pulling on that rope, it might be helpful to remember: it’s you at both ends, and you can put down the rope whenever you want.

‘The universe is wider than our views of it,’ said Thoreau. The world and all its futures need not fit inside our heads, and the same is true of its people. You can, if you choose, if you practise it, let the people in your life be where they are, outside your head, in all their unknowable complexity, without needing to suspect motivations you will never have confirmed. You can meet events as they unfold and on their own terms. You can, as has written, let the future be the future. You don’t have to carry the burden of constant understanding. You can live a little lighter.

A contronym is a word that is its own opposite. To ‘dust’ something can mean to apply dust or to remove it – I can dust a cake (apply) or dust my shelves (remove). ‘Left’ can refer to those who departed or those who remain – ‘many left the party, so only a few were left.’ My favourite contronym is ‘off,’ which bizarrely can also mean ‘on’ – if your alarm goes off, you turn it off. Ridiculous. The most controversial contronym is ‘literally,’ which – in spite of the public outcry – most dictionaries now take to mean ‘figuratively’ too, since dictionaries don’t police word usage, they merely record it. So the next time someone tells you the story of how they ‘literally died’ of embarrassment, you can, I hope, take comfort in the fact they no longer need correcting. Contronyms. These words are shapeshifters, becoming their own opposites depending on the context.

With that in mind, it’s time for you to give back the thought I asked you to hold for me, all the way back in paragraph four. Remember? Ah yes, here we are. It was doubt in its negative forms: to be lacking in confidence (if we doubt our ability), or anxious (if we’re uncertain about the future), or stagnant (if we cannot make a decision). None of these are pleasant states in which to live. And yet... and yet. Trapped as we are inside our own heads, stuck as we are in this present moment, only the most infinitesimal fraction of the world can ever be truly known to us. All the rest is doubt. Doubt is, for the most part, the only state in which we can live. It’s everywhere. It inhibits action, yet can also be a result of having acted. It may prevent us from trying something in the first place, but be felt all the more acutely when we eventually do. Doubt is its own kind of contronym. It gets in the way of life, and yet, in some sense, it is the inevitable consequence of what it means to live.

Alright. So where does all that leave us? Well, in keeping with the spirit of the piece, I’m not exactly sure. Certainly, if we have decisions to make, our doubts are often worth paying attention to – don’t buy the house if it’s not quite right, nor marry the man if he’s not for you – and our doubts might be equally useful if they encourage us to question the status quo, to form our own opinions. It’s when our doubts start making up stories that we need to be mindful of them, when they fill in unknowns with imagined scenarios: what other people will think, or how they might respond, or exactly how the future will come to pass. That’s when our doubts become unwanted background noise, fictions for us to fret over. And in those cases, maybe we should recognise them as little more than the exhaust fumes of an overactive mind. Maybe seeing them in this way diminishes their importance, prevents us from mistaking them for the truth, and allows us to appreciate the tiny sliver of true certainty available to us, in the place we should have been all along – the here and the now.

I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but I’ve started meditating. I know. Awful. I do apologise. Those who don’t meditate can find it so very tiresome listening to those who do. There’s an inward eye-roll from anyone remotely sceptical, from busy parents or professionals who can’t imagine ever finding the time for it, or from those who just find the whole thing a bit woo-woo. I sympathise with that. I always felt gently dismissive when I heard about the benefits of meditation, or when I pictured those who practised it – people who I always imagined must be, at least on some level, just a little bit unbearable. So I know how you feel, and I’m sorry.

If it’s any consolation, I’ve absolutely no interest in convincing you to do it. I only mention it because the idea behind this post has its roots in meditation, or metacognition if that’s more palatable for you. If you’re anything like me, I hope you’ll find what follows worthwhile even if the idea of ‘focussing on the breath’ makes you feel quietly nauseous. Indeed, it was precisely those notions I shunned in the past. In a world where video games exist, sitting and breathing seemed like the most extraordinary waste of time. I was sure meditation was great, but it was great for other people and it wouldn’t benefit someone like me. Well, it turns out I was wrong and the monks were right. Of course the monks were right.

I now meditate for ten minutes a day, with the exception of the days I spend with my nearly-two-year-old son, when I tend to cut my meditation down to approximately no minutes whatsoever. I’ve been using the highly recommended Waking Up app, which primarily focusses on a meditation practice known as Vipassana. You can go deep on this (oh boy, can you) but the essence is simple: to cultivate a greater awareness of your own field of consciousness. Mindfulness, if you will. There’s no attempt to stop thinking, or to clear one’s mind (though other meditation practices may differ), rather the emphasis is on noticing the mind as it is, and not identifying too strongly with what’s going on in there. It’s not just about thoughts, of course – anything can become the subject of increased awareness – but for the purposes of this post, we’re dealing with the stuff we think.

One of the startling truths you notice when you’ve meditated for a while is that you don’t actually have control over what goes on inside your own head. On one hand, this is an outrageous claim – of course we have control over our thoughts. Entire schools of philosophy are based around the idea that we can, and should, control them. But then, on the other hand, it’s entirely obvious that we can’t, and the more time you spend watching your thoughts, and the closer you pay attention to them, the more apparent this becomes.

Your mind isn’t some tranquil cabin in the woods, as well you know. It’s more akin to living next door to everyone you’ve ever met (and maybe even a few people you haven’t), and they pop round whenever they want, to chat about whatever they like, and they all have a copy of your front door key, so they come and go as they please. The more pleasant neighbours are perfectly polite – they won’t stay, they were just passing by and wanted to remind you of an upcoming birthday that you really must remember. Some want to stay for longer, because you haven’t seen them in a while, you didn’t reply to their recent message, and you must get back to them soon (if they don't already hate you). Often the ones least deserving of your time are the same ones who insist on making themselves at home – they outstay their welcome, talk to you about topics you’d rather forget, and make you feel generally uneasy. You live next door to a lot of neighbours, and many are loud and persistent. You can hear them through the walls at night. Some keep you awake at 3am.

You can’t decide who turns up at your door, but maybe you can decide how you treat those guests, how much importance you give them. Maybe there’s a distinction to be made between the thought and the response, between the what and the how. But the central truth remains: we don’t choose our thoughts; they happen by themselves. And if you’re unconvinced by that notion, I invite you to try having no thoughts at all for the next sixty seconds and see how you get on. The idea that we may not control what goes on in our minds is a disquieting realisation and a deep rabbit hole to travel down, one which can raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of the self. After all, if we’re incapable of deciding what we think, then who even are we? (You can ponder that crisis in your own time. We’re moving on.)

What, then, of timing? Even if we presume the substance of the thought is within our control, the timing certainly is not. You don’t know when a thought will arise and you don’t know when it will stop. There’s a fun mind game that plays on this idea. If you’re already familiar with it, I apologise in advance. If you haven’t yet heard of it, it’s known as The Game, and the only objective of The Game is not to think about it. When you do think about it, you lose The Game, and you must announce your loss aloud (‘I just lost The Game’) – which, of course, creates a cascade of losses in any other players who happen to be in the vicinity. To learn of The Game’s existence is to become a new player (welcome!). To think of it is to lose, and there is no way to win. Devastating.

Should someone lose The Game in company, the losses tend to follow a particular pattern. A guy drops his head. ‘Oh no,’ he mutters. ‘What is it?’ someone asks, concerned. ‘I just lost The Game,’ he whispers. Cries of noooo! fill the air. Everyone else has now lost The Game too, and so they insult him as they all continue to lose The Game together during the hours that follow. Maybe the next morning, people send messages announcing further losses. But over time, the losses fade. Nobody thinks of The Game, nobody mentions it. Some claim to go for years without losing The Game. In fact, before I wrote this post, I think I’d gone a couple of years myself.

But The Game is not unique. The Game is every thought you’ve ever had. You have no way of knowing where the thought will come from. You don’t know whether something in the environment will trigger it, or another person, and you don’t know when it might rise, unbidden and inexplicably, from some deep, dark, long-forgotten corner of your mind. And then at some point, you’ll think of it for the last time – or at least the last time in a long while – but you have no possible way of recognising that. You do not know whether the next time you think of it will be the last, or how long the thought will be gone for when it does go.

All of which is to say, you can’t choose what you think, you don’t know when you’ll think it, and once you are thinking it, you have no idea when you’ll stop. What an absolute nightmare. No wonder we’re such a mess.

The post I wrote before this one was called 50 Things I Wonder. Number 44 on that list read, ‘I wonder if there’s an optimal ratio of thought to action.’ Substacker speculated further in the comments, wondering about the optimal duration between thought and action. I have an answer to this, and that’s what you’ve been reading.

The answer comes from two different directions. The first is from author, teacher and Buddhist scholar Joseph Goldstein, who has a wonderful approach to generosity: when he has a generous impulse, he acts on it immediately. It’s such a simple thought. It doesn’t ask us to be more generous, but rather to give action to that feeling whenever it may arise. Lovely.

The second, somewhat opposite, direction comes from Dr. Tim Pychyl – a psychologist whose work sought to better understand procrastination. As a freelance writer, his short book Solving The Procrastination Puzzle may well have changed my life. And do you know what he tells us to do when we notice the impulse to procrastinate? Nothing. Nothing. Easy, right? We can all do nothing. More precisely, we should notice the thought, sit with it, and put as much space as we can between impulse and action. That’s it. Eventually, the impulse to do something else will fade, and in time you become a wiser fish who learns to see the bait for what it is.

What have we got here then? When we put all this together – a Buddhist acting quickly and a doctor acting slowly, and, let’s not forget, the impermanence of thoughts and their flighty, fickle nature – I think we find a wider lesson. If the thought is constructive, if it would benefit us or those we care about, we should translate it into action as fast as we can. But if the thought is destructive, if it threatens to derail us from whatever we hope to achieve, we should delay acting on it for as long as possible. And it’s curious to note that for many of us, our default mode is often the precise opposite – we freely give action to that which derails us while forever delaying that which would help.

As we learned from The Game (sorry), all thoughts will pass. That means we are in the business of acting on the good thoughts while they’re with us, and living with the bad thoughts until they leave us. Like much that would help us in life, it’s simple but not easy, because it requires a keen awareness of our own patterns of thought, which is where meditation comes in – but this is not a post about that.

As with anything that claims to be simple, there are caveats here. While it’s easy – in theory – to ‘do nothing’ in response to a negative thought, there are times when it will seem inconceivable to act fast on a positive thought. What if the thought is to redecorate your entire house? What if you’re doing something else that demands your full attention when you have that thought? And what about planning? Is that a thought that’s been translated into action, or a form of thinking that still needs acting upon? What’s a healthy amount of time to plan for? I’m not yet sure how to answer these questions.

But that’s ok. This is not a definitive guide on how to live, but a small idea that may be helpful to those who connect with it: the optimal duration between thought and action changes depending on the net good the thought will provide when we act upon it. It’s not going to solve all our problems, but might nevertheless serve as a tiny, little signpost in the event we ever need it.

1. I wonder if how you feel about Mondays is just how you feel about life. 

2. I wonder if psithurism is the most beautiful word in the English language. It’s pronounced sith-yoor-ism. It means the sound of leaves rustling in the wind.

3. I wonder why the melody for the Alphabet Song is the same as the melody for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I wonder what happened there and if anyone ever got upset about it.

4. I wonder how much of parenting young children day by day depends on two things. One, having a plan. And two, accepting that your plan will rarely go exactly to plan.

5. I wonder how much of life is like that too. 

6. I wonder why anyone bothers saying ‘half a dozen’ when they could simply say ‘six’ and move on with their lives.

7. I wonder how much our personalities are set, and how much we’ll truly change. I wonder if the capacity for change is just another aspect of our personalities.

8. I wonder how much we should be at peace with our own nature and how much we should fight it. I wonder what the optimal ratio is of acceptance to striving.

9. I wonder if it’s easier to be content with a smaller sense of self.

10. I wonder how much happiness can be attained by giving up on our idea of what happiness should be.

11. I wonder how important it is to hope, and the healthiest way to do so. I wonder if it’s possible to be happy with the life we have while aspiring to a better one at the same time (or if each gnaws away at the other).

12. I wonder how often I appear in the background of the photographs of strangers. I wonder what those photographs look like and where I was going on the day they were taken.

13. I wonder what the world actually looks like. If – as neuroscientist Anil Seth says – consciousness is a ‘controlled hallucination,’ if our brains exist in the darkness and silence of our own skulls, and if everything we experience is just the brain’s best guess at what’s out there in the world, then what really is out there in the world, and how does it differ from our experience of it?

14. I wonder to what extent disappointment and discouragement, anger and sorrow are just a product of our own expectations. I wonder if the higher our expectations, the greater our capacity for sadness.

15. I wonder how much of our lives are governed by the expectations of others. And I wonder how much they should be.

16. I wonder if hard work makes life harder, or if hard work makes life easier.

17. I wonder if the best way to preserve your potential is by never really trying, if the best way to believe in your own talent is by never fully testing it.

18. I wonder how much of what we call talent is actually just a form of education. I wonder how much of it is learning, training, technique.

19. I wonder how much we use the word ‘talent’ as a way of dismissing another person’s hard work and passion, or of justifying our own shortcomings. The painting is good, we tell ourselves, not because of the hours invested in learning the craft, or the sacrifices made along the way, or the effort and consideration that went into its creation, but rather because the artist is talented.

20. I wonder if the act of working hard at something can actually generate talent. (And I wonder if there’s any harm in believing that, even if it isn’t true.)

21. I wonder if there are better words for talent. Perhaps people have particular abilities not because they are talented, but rather because they are industrious, curious, patient, or have vim and vigour and verve.

22. I wonder why you can’t hold your nose and hum at the same time. We don’t hum through our noses, surely?

23. I wonder if the ideas associated with a particular wine are more important than its actual taste. I wonder if the most important thing about a bottle of wine is the story of its grape.

24. I wonder how much of parenting young children day by day is a question of deciding for yourself what matters and what doesn’t. A fistful of yogurt on your freshly laundered shirt. Rolls of toilet paper hurled into a bath full of water. Shit on your nose (don’t ask). It matters if you think it does – and doesn’t if you don’t.

25. I wonder how much of life is like that too.

26. I wonder how much time we spend living in quiet opposition to the world around us. A nearby fly. Someone in our way. The ‘wrong’ weather. Buffering.

27. I wonder how much energy we spend on the silent judgement of others.

28. I wonder how we can be so certain in our judgement of another person’s life, and so full of doubt in our own.

29. I wonder how much success is determined solely by a person’s tolerance for staying with a problem.

30. I wonder how much of creativity is patience.

31. I wonder how much of creativity is generating options. 

32. I wonder if it’s possible to hold two beliefs about our creative work simultaneously: on one hand, this is awful, on the other, I can make it great – to be our own harshest critic and our own biggest fan, and to understand which role is needed at any given moment.

33. I wonder if persistence is always wise. I wonder if some ideas should simply be abandoned. I wonder how to spot them.

34. I wonder what the correct balance is between trusting in your gut reaction and questioning your instincts. Too much of one, and the quality may suffer. Too much of the other, and you’ll never even finish.

35. I wonder if the times my opinion warrants the greatest scrutiny are the times when it forms the fastest.

36. I wonder whether the opposite of procrastination is not motivation, or will-power, or action. But rather it is routine, it is schedule.

37. I wonder if there’s increased value in slowing down the more the world accelerates.

38. I wonder the total number of times someone will say my name aloud, even after I die. There must be a number – what is it? I wonder about this number, and the finite pool my friends and family are drawing from every time they refer to me.

39. I wonder if any character in the history of film and television has ever successfully cleaned up broken glass without cutting a finger.

40. I wonder if one of the reasons some of us struggle with writing is because that one word – ‘writing’ – conveys too many different actions: dreaming, reasoning, drafting, plotting, editing, cutting. I wonder if we would have a better relationship with writing if we had clearer terms for each part of the process, if we were better at recognising which part of the process we were in, and if we could learn to be at peace with it. Creating is finding the right words; editing is finding the wrong ones. And you cannot write without doing both.

41. I wonder if, despite my distaste for them, a semicolon might occasionally be justified. (See the penultimate sentence above in Wondering No. 40. And yes, I know there’s a comma splice in No. 36, and no, I do not care.)

42. I wonder what it is about the early morning that makes passing strangers more likely to greet each other.

43. I wonder if not all problems can be solved by thinking. I wonder if there are times we’re better off acting first and thinking later, and I wonder what those times might be.

44. I wonder if there’s an optimal ratio of thought to action.

45. I wonder how much of our time is spent in the battle between where we would like to direct our attention, and where others would like us to direct it.

46. I wonder why the foods I want to eat secretly in the kitchen are the same foods that have the loudest packaging.

47. I wonder if you can only truly learn your flaws from those who know you well.

48. I wonder if winning the argument is the same thing as being right.

49. I wonder how often we get upset with others when the problem is actually us.

50. I wonder if ‘etc.’ means anything other than, ‘I’ve now run out of examples.’

I stole this post format from , who stole it from , who stole it from . While they all know things, I’ve found myself more comfortable wondering them. This has changed the tone of the format somewhat, but I don’t mind if you don’t.

I have no doubt these wonderings are a soup of ideas absorbed from others over the years. Maybe I’ll expand on some of them in a post of their own one day.

You’re running twenty minutes late to meet friends and you’re feeling awful about it. What do you do? If you’re a responsible human, you’ll call or send a message to apologise and to communicate your best estimate for how late you’re running. Let’s call that realistically late. To run realistically late is common, and, if you are such a person, any other course of action might seem utterly inconceivable. But some of us don’t run realistically late. Some of us run hopefully late.

To run hopefully late means telling our friends we’re running ten minutes behind when the reality is closer to twenty. Maybe we haven’t truly considered the situation in detail and it’s just a lazy guess, an estimate with a shrug. Or maybe it’s a conscious or unconscious desire to underplay how late we’re running to those affected, to minimise how much of a big deal it is. We don’t want to make the bad situation worse, or admit to our own failings, and so we soften the reality as best we can. Nobody panic, we say. Everything’s fine.

These are the two most common models for running behind, but I’d like to propose a third. I’d like to propose that the next time you’re running behind, you see how it feels to be pessimistically late, and to say you’re running later than you think you are. It will probably feel unnatural at first to paint an even gloomier picture than you suspect is true, but here are three reasons why you should.

1. The Intangibles

The most sensible reason to say you’re running later than you think you are is that you probably are running later than you think you are. And that’s because of one very simple fact: the consequences of whatever caused your delay have yet to fully play out. This is even true if the only reason for your lateness is your own poor time management.

You don’t yet know that you can’t find your keys because you won’t know they’re missing until you look for them. You don’t truly know how bad traffic is until you’re out the other side (regardless of what your maps app tells you), ditto disruption on public transport (regardless of what the departure boards say). And, because you’ve yet to engage with it, you don’t yet know that the final part of the project you’re working on has a level of complexity you’ll need additional time to unpack, or, as the Ninety-Ninety rule from the world of computer programming states:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

(For what it’s worth, that’s why I suspect there’ll be one more delay on the GTA6 release date. It’s a project of such complexity that it’s impossible to predict how long it will take to complete, even for those who are making it.)

These are the intangibles of running behind. You don’t know yet what you don’t yet know, and so you are later than you think you are.

2. The Rise and Fall of Resentment Levels

Let’s imagine you’re running hopefully late, so you tell your friends you’re running ten minutes behind rather than twenty. You’ve made yourself feel better (for a moment) and you’ve somewhat appeased your friends (for now). The situation is far more palatable. Well done.

But you’ve made a terrible mistake. You haven’t changed the reality of the situation. You’ve only changed the moment at which your friends learn the truth. They may be less annoyed when you initially break the news, but they’ll now be waiting longer than you told them they’d have to, so they’ll be more annoyed by the time you get there. The ten minutes you omitted now becomes time in which any negative feelings can crescendo, building to a climax just in time for your actual arrival.

Now let’s rewind and imagine you tell your friends you’re running thirty minutes late instead. Thirty minutes‽ Your friends are upset – that’s pretty late. You create peak resentment at the moment you break the news, but – because you’ve yet to arrive – you’re not around to experience it (thank goodness you’re running late!). They now have a while to process what you’ve told them and come to terms with the situation, during which time resentment levels will likely descend.

And when you do arrive, it’s not even as bad as everyone thought – you’re only twenty minutes late. Your friends are glad to see you.

3. You Can Now Be Early

You can now be early. Well, sort of. Obviously you’re still late – you’ve missed the agreed arrival time – but you’ve created the possibility of arriving early for the revised arrival time, the one that you dictated.

That’s an important detail, by the way. It’s the latecomer who dictates the revised arrival time. It’s an opportunity to regain control of the situation and it should not be treated lightly. If you get the revised arrival time wrong, then not only are you late for the agreed time, but you’re late for the new time too. You’re late twice. You’re a double-schmuck. Nobody wants to be a double-schmuck.

So there we are. Three observations on the possible merits of being pessimistically late. How much later should you claim to be running? Well, it will depend on the situation. I think adding 50% is about right for a small delay – if you think you’re running ten minutes late, call it fifteen. Maybe you’ll want to add a little less, especially if you have good experience of whatever has caused the delay. Maybe you should even add more if you’re working on a task you know is complex.

But beware! To employ this technique means running early for the revised time, and running early brings a kind of tranquility. If you were genuinely running early, you’d have earned this tranquility and you could enjoy it, but for our purposes it’s a trap. The point of being pessimistic about your arrival time is not so you can stop and grab a coffee on the way to the meeting, or so you can finally relax about that looming deadline. For the practice to be effective, you must do everything in your power to sustain your pace, otherwise you’re only recreating a new version of the same problem you sought to avoid, and you run the risk of being stuck in an endless loop of lateness – like one of Zeno’s paradoxes – perpetually in transit, trapped between the place you left and the place you’re going, distracted by the future, anxious about the journey, until you finally realise that the event came and went without you, and so you return home – departed but never arrived, alive yet not quite living.

Don’t do that, for goodness’ sake. Do anything but that.

I’m secretly avoiding an enormous pile of laundry. It’s clean and dry, no problems there, but now it needs sorting and putting away. It sits on the same bed I dumped it on an hour ago and it cuts an intimidating figure – three feet high and four feet wide – impressive in its way, but also a reminder that I really need to do the laundry more often. It’s not going anywhere, this laundry pile. It is unapologetic and stubborn, and sooner or later I have to do something about it. I have to begin.

To begin. What a concept. The ultimate prerequisite. You can’t do anything without beginning it first – it’s literally impossible. You cannot continue what you haven’t begun, and you’ve no hope at all of completing it. But beginnings are sly and tricksy things, and the more we know we need to start, the more the start eludes us.

This is traditionally the domain of productivity gurus, of which I am very much not. Instead, I am awful and not someone anyone should seek to emulate. I have been fortunate enough to earn a living as a freelance writer for much of my life, and have spent most of my career gleefully committing to starting later and then being surprised when later arrives and I don’t have enough time. And it’s not like this only happened once. It happens as a matter of course. Time repeatedly demonstrates the manner in which it operates, how it’s passing by all the while – right this very moment, in fact – and that it won’t magically slow down for me later so I can catch up on what I missed. Meanwhile, I presume there’s loads of time – I don’t have that much to do – and it’ll all be fine I’m sure. Well, it’s never fine. There’s never enough time and I never learn. The repeated nature of this experience has led me to a tragic and inescapable conclusion: I am an idiot. The only upside of my idiocy is that I’m deeply intrigued by it, and so I enjoy spending time reading about and reflecting on the best ways of dealing with it.

One school of thought, popularised by Brian Tracy in the early 2000s, argues for the benefits of eating a frog. Many frogs are real (just ask a biologist), but this one is a metaphor – it’s your most difficult or important task – and eating it means doing it first and getting it done. The idea stems from an unverified Mark Twain quote: ‘Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.’ You’re familiar, I’m sure.

It’s a call to action, a slap round the face: come on, ya bastard – do the thing! Does this approach have merit? Maybe. To accomplish something early in the day is a much more pleasant feeling than spending the morning with the weight of that same task hanging over us. But for me, this frog-eating business has always felt like less of a call to action and more of a barrier to one. I'm not sure it’s helpful to focus our attention on what’s most difficult, and I’m not convinced that doing it first is conducive to the act of beginning. Some people may find a benefit in dramatising the start of something – to ‘attack’ the task, or to ‘crush’ the to-do list – but for me such language is less an incentive and more a deterrent.

The truth is – and I’ve found this to be a tremendously liberating thought – you can start wherever you want. The Start Police will not come for you if you fail to begin with something daunting. No task will be later appraised on how well its difficulty levels diminished throughout, nor how radically it began. And maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the best beginnings aren’t exerting too much effort or trying to prove a point. Maybe the best beginnings are small and quiet and mind their own business.

The world of psychology knows well that beginning a task creates tension, while completing it brings relief. Humans generally don’t like leaving things unresolved, which makes us more likely to return to tasks we have already begun. It’s bad news for workaholics who struggle to switch off over the weekend, but good news for freelance procrastinators who exist in a state of perpetual self-loathing, because we can use this information to help us. Consider this: we are more likely to continue than we were to begin. Or, to put it another way, once you’re already hoovering, it takes far less effort to keep going than it took to pick up the vacuum cleaner in the first place.

So! What is the easiest way to begin? It’s a question I return to as often as I can. It’s a hoax for myself, a game I play, a way of tricking the part of me prone to lethargy. The thought of finding the easiest task misdirects from the broader notion of actually beginning. I may not want to do the task, but I can at least search my inbox for the relevant email, or open a document and read the first sentence. I can even trick myself further by making the question hypothetical: ‘If I were going to start, where would I begin?’ I’m not actually going to start the thing (a preposterous notion) but if I were going to, what would I do?

The task is complex. To begin the task is simple. Both of these statements can be true at the same time.

And if you need an example of that, check out the work of the artist Reuben Margolin. He makes beautiful kinetic sculptures of wave forms, simple in their concept but astonishing in their complexity. One such sculpture, Contours, consists of 70,000 parts and took five intensive months of planning, machining and assembling to complete.

In 2021, I got to interview Reuben for Tangram magazine. I asked him about his process and how a new project comes to life. ‘Eventually things come together,’ he said, ‘and I take the first step, drilling a hole or cutting something. I usually think, well I’ll just make this one little part.’

Considering the precision and scale of a typical Reuben Margolin sculpture, there’s a huge disconnect between the finished state of the sculpture and the place he begins work on it – drilling a hole, or cutting something, or making ‘one little part.’ When I pointed this out to him he shrugged the question away. ‘You gotta start somewhere,’ he said. To him, and to all who don’t struggle with procrastination, maybe this statement is trivial – but the rest of us can learn from it. A beginning needn't be formal or grand. Reuben didn’t order all 70,000 parts to begin Contours.

That's significant, I think – the informality of the start. ‘Maybe there’s some material sitting around my shop,’ Reuben said, ‘and I’ll wonder whether maybe I could use that material for this particular part.’ Note how low he makes the barrier to entry, how little friction he creates. He’s not fussy about how he starts something. He begins with whatever’s nearby. Contrast that with the following.

The first time I read this, I felt personally attacked. Not that I need a cabin in the woods or the first snow of winter – maybe I’m on the lower end of the scale – but there’s no doubt Verlyn Klinkenborg is writing about me. Sure, I’ll start writing, but I can’t possibly do that without a cup of tea – which means finding my favourite mug (the header image to this essay), or a clean desk – which means tidying it – and all the while the day slips away.

The more complex our idea of the beginning, the more barriers we create to entry, the less likely we are to begin. But the simpler our idea of it, the simpler we make our starting point, the simpler it becomes. Beginnings are not complicated. We are.

I glance again at my mountain of laundry. There, among the jumbled mound of hoodies and towels and pants, I see two yellow socks – one atop the pile, the other peeking out from within. The mountain is colossal and the job will take a while, but if nothing else I can pair the yellow socks. I can take out one and then the other. That doesn’t seem so hard.

This little essay is set in July of 2020, the UK. The initial horror and darkness of the pandemic had given way to longer, warmer days. Pubs and cinemas opened their doors again, and theme parks and swimming pools too. The second wave was on its way and Christmas would later be cancelled but I didn’t know that yet, and in my ignorance I had a fleeting, peaceful feeling that things were looking up.

Maybe that’s why I bought myself a birthday present that year. It’s uncharacteristic of me – I’m not sure I’ve done it before or since – but in July of 2020, the summer I turned 37, I was both the generous giver and gracious receiver of a Rollei 35S – a film camera from the 70s. I’m not a great photographer but I am an enthusiastic one, and I’d had my eye on a Rollei 35S for a while. 

It’s a distinctive design and a dinky little thing – one of the most compact 35mm film cameras ever manufactured, so they say. It’s heavy to hold and tricky to focus, an enormously satisfying object to use. The shutter button clunks and the wind lever whirs and the lens extends and retracts. But the tactile joy of such analogue equipment often brings with it a responsibility to know roughly how it works, to have at least some understanding of what’s going on inside the box. I am a fool, and so I did not, and so I broke the camera on day one.

You have no obligation to know the inner workings of your smart phone – you cannot break the insides by pressing buttons in the wrong order – but the Rollei 35S is full of parts that twist and move. You have to pull out the lens before you press the shutter, and wind the film before you retract the lens. I did something out of sequence that first day, and as I pulled the wind lever I felt something inside the camera snap. The camera rattled when I shook it (not what cameras should do) and when I got the film developed I found shots like these.

You’ll see on the left where the film hasn’t fully wound, leaving a slice of my parents’ garden on the edge of my living room wall. By all objective measures it’s a terrible photograph. What am I even attempting to capture here? There’s no clear subject, no sense of composition. Just shapes among the grain.

And yet, in its abstractness, this photo contains the story of a day. The image is broken because the camera was, which reminds me of the morning I broke it, of a sunny breakfast at a riverside restaurant, my wife reassuring me that the camera would be fine, and me resisting the urge to sulk and claim the day was ruined.

On the left of the photo, a glimpse of a summer afternoon spent in my parents’ garden with family. The precise details elude me now, but there will have been food (there always is), and a sense of reunion in the midst of the pandemic, and nephews gleefully running amok, and cake and cups of tea.

In the rest of the photo, if I tilt my head, I see birthday cards on the table, banners on the ceiling, and the balloons my wife has blown up for me. I see glimpses of the effort others have put in to make the day feel special. I can picture my cat curled up in his blanket. I get a feeling of returning home.

Morning, afternoon, evening – a single image that spans a day. I could never have sought that result deliberately, or have known the outcome before I got the film developed. Such is the joy of the analogue. If you can’t delete or undo at your whim, the accidents are permanent. You sit with them for longer than you otherwise would. You contemplate them more.

My little Rollei has since been fixed, and I own other film cameras now too, but I occasionally get similar accidents from early test shots, like the header image for this essay, and like the one below.

What’s going on in these images then? Well, loading a film camera means pulling a strip of film from the canister on one side of the camera to the winding gear on the other, exposing it to light in the process. What you’re seeing in these images is the meeting point between the film that was exposed to the light and the film that remained in the darkness. If the winding process aligns a shot between these two states, and if the shutter fires to catch it, you get one of these little demi-pics.

I’ve found it difficult to predict which rolls of film, which cameras, will collect such slices of light. Maybe they’re a result of the gears not fully engaging with the eyelets in the film, since I suspect if the camera is working perfectly (or if the user fully understands how to use it) the first shot will always be full. I think it’s also likely that whether I see such images is at the discretion of whoever develops and scans the negatives. The value of an image is, after all, entirely a matter of taste.

In general, whenever you load a new roll of film, you click and wind, click and wind – two shots of nothing and then the roll is ready. Even so, I’ve developed the habit of always pointing the camera at something for those first shots of the roll. I don’t worry about what I point the camera at – whatever’s nearby, it’s not too important, and there’s no way of knowing the outcome. Maybe I’ll capture a piece of something interesting, or maybe it’ll be nothing at all, or maybe whoever sees it won’t think it’s worth their while. But I point the camera anyway and I push the button regardless.

Click and wind, click and wind.