It started outside, as a regular conversation about the day that evolved into something with more weight. Over the next two hours, in stages, it became a conversation with some important thoughts and questions in it.

We stopped for a cup of tea, picked it up again on a couch, stopped again for some food, and then for something ordinary that needed doing. The last part of it happened while walking.

It was long, honest, and in some ways genuinely good. It also left things unanswered. Questions that went by without acknowledgement. Points from both of us that didn’t get the neater resolution we might have hoped for. Things I’d really wanted clarity on and didn’t get.

I have an oscillating relationship with ambiguity and unresolved things that are important to me. I don’t always know or remember how to stay with a question that got asked and never answered.

By default, my instinct is to notice the gap, track progress, file it, and bring it back up again in another moment. Sometimes that’s useful, and the passage of time and some reflection helps. But sometimes it’s a way of me refusing to tolerate incompleteness and the discomfort I can feel in it.

I try to remind myself that conversations aren’t documents or debates. They don’t cover everything. They have their own momentum, and things fall out because other things come up, or we get stuck on something else.

The trouble is that when something is at stake and we’re paying close attention, incompleteness starts to feel like avoidance or evasion. Every unanswered question becomes evidence of something, and every dropped thread starts to feel like a door closing.

I know this about myself. My pattern recognition is strong, my past experiences bumpy and hard, and sometimes my vigilance runs hot. It’s difficult to know whether I’ve spotted a pattern or am seeing previous experiences in current ones because some elements are similar.

What I’ve been trying is to hold an unresolved thing without turning it into a verdict, and let it stay that way for a while.

Because the alternative is forcing everything to a resolution before the conversation closes. But that makes for a thorough and exhausting exchange, more like a position paper developed out loud.

I’ve noticed that conversations held with this kind of grip, where everything has to close before we stop, tend to produce compliance rather than honesty. People say what’s needed to end the conversation, not necessarily what’s true.

There’s a skill here that I want to become better at: ending a conversation knowing it isn’t finished, and being all right with that.

Steady enough with the knowledge that it covered what it covered today, and the rest will come in time. That requires trusting there will be more time, which is its own kind of hope and faith.

I’ve also noticed that when I do loosen a little, where an incomplete thing is allowed to stay that way for a little while, it sometimes produces what the tight grip would have missed. Given room, people often move toward honesty on their own.

Open loops are not my natural habitat. They’re uncomfortable, and I’ve spent a long time closing them fast and calling that thoroughness.

The walk that afternoon was the last part of our conversation on those topics that day, and it ended because we arrived somewhere.

I’ve been carrying two of those questions since, and I still haven’t worked out whether that’s patience, or the older habit with a nice bow tie.

Three things to try.

1. Sort what closed from what didn’t
After an important conversation, take stock of what got resolved and what didn’t. Then notice our relationship to the open ones. Are we holding them open, or working them closed?

2. Ask whether it needs answering today
When we’re carrying something unanswered, the useful question is whether it needs resolution now, or whether it can wait for a moment with more room in it.

3. Leave one thing open on purpose
Try ending a conversation, even a small one, without reaching for full resolution. Leave a thread for next time, and see whether it feels like unfinished business or like space.

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Most nights I wage a battle with sleep.

Generally I take myself off to bed around 11pm or so, even if I’ve been tired for hours. Logically I know an earlier bedtime is good for me, and when I’m completely exhausted I honour it, but in the main, I find myself reluctant to hand over those evening hours to sleep.

Why? By around 8-9pm the day has been spoken for with work, the trip there and back, dinner, and two or three hours of study I need to do five or so nights a week. What’s left is what I protect: an hour or two of quiet peace that I’ve learned helps me relax and wind down. It might be a book or a show, or some personal writing.

It often feels like the only part of the day that is truly mine, and I have become so protective of it that I’ll refuse to hand it over to sleep. Even though I know that would be good for me. So I’ll get off to sleep by midnight, wake at six or six thirty. Six hours… less than the eight or nine I know I need.

I’ve called that a preference for years. But it’s really a trade. The quiet evening hours take the sleeping hours, and it impacts me all the next day.

A little while ago I had nothing scheduled on a weekend day. No expectations, nobody needing anything, nowhere to be, and the day just for me.

There’s a small town an hour or so away from where I live with a bookshop I love. The kind where an hour disappears and you come out with three things you weren’t looking for. I was looking forward to that day all week.

The night before though, I did the ‘not giving up sleep’ thing. I stayed awake and protected the quiet, peaceful hours, and I slept through the morning. So I woke late, moved slowly, and by the time I was somewhat ready, the day had passed the point where the drive and some time in the bookshop would fit.

Here’s the part that gets me: that drive was a chance for peace too. An hour of open road, a favourite playlist, a shop where nobody knows me. Better peace than the two hours I stayed up to protect, and a whole day of it instead of the tail end of one. I gave up the good version to keep the small one.

I can see where I’m going wrong and what I need to work on. I’ve cast bedtime as the thing taking my peaceful quiet time, instead of seeing it as peace and restoration. And sometimes it’s not just me who pays that cost the next day, but other people. They get the flatter version of me, the shorter sentences, the attention that’s not fully there.

There’s a hard question sitting underneath this habit, and I’ve been dancing around it for quite a while, both in my own reflections and in therapy.

What am I afraid of missing if I go to sleep, and why do I view sleep as ‘missing out’ on something?

The deeper truth is, I don’t fully know what I’m staying up for. Some nights it’s genuinely because I’m reading a good book or watching a good show that has me captured. Other nights I wonder if it’s because a book or show asks nothing of me, and lets me just be whatever I am feeling.

There are a couple of things in my life at the moment that do ask something of me, and to feel some big and hard feelings. If that’s what the hour being distracted by a book or show really is, then calling it peace is generous. Because peace and avoidance look identical from the outside.

Clearly, I don’t have this worked out.

But I have the honesty about it, and a willingness to keep working on it and improving. And that’s a good place to build from.

Three things to try.

1. Work out who pays for the hour.
Acknowledge what tomorrow gives up so tonight can run long, and check whether it’s a fair trade.

2. Ask what the hour is actually for.
Rest and avoidance both feel like a book at eleven o’clock, and the difference usually shows up the next day rather than at the time.

3. Move it by fifteen minutes.
An hour earlier is a plan we abandon easily. Fifteen minutes stands a better chance of taking root.

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‘Why are you still waiting? There’s a counter free.’

That was the greeting. It arrived before a hello, before eye contact had properly settled. A question about my pace was put to me by the person whose job it was to serve me.

I walked over very slowly. Gently put my things down in the same slow motion, said nothing at all, and looked at them with a blank face. I let the silence sit on the counter between us, and made sure they were in it with me. Two can play at this rude and awkward game, I thought.

It seemed fair at the time. They’d set the vibe, and I was matching it. There’s a small satisfaction in that which I’d rather not admit to, and am going to have to. Because I wish I’d done it differently.

I spent years on the other side of counters like that one. Retail, phone lines, service desks. It’s why I notice how people in those jobs conduct themselves, and why the noticing has been unhappy lately.

Shorter greetings, if there is one. Less warmth. More attention to closing the transaction than to the customer. Thinking about it more, I’ve felt myself starting to form the sentence that begins ‘In my day’, which is usually the sound of someone about to be out of touch.

Because the job of today isn’t the job I did thirty years ago.

Nearly nine in ten retail and fast food workers were verbally abused by a customer last year, the number reporting physical violence has doubled over the past three years, and their pay has gone backwards over the past five years. The person in front of me that day had less money in real terms than the job paid not long ago, no time spare, and a fair expectation that someone would have a go at them before the shift ended.

None of that was information I had at the counter, and all of it was true anyway. What I did with my three or four seconds was decide the exchange had already been set, and then help it stay that way.

Nothing had gone wrong for me that day. I had every bit of the warmth that was missing from the greeting, and I chose not to offer it, because at the time it felt like letting them off for being rude.

In the time since, I’ve come to feel that regardless of how the initiator starts an interaction, we can choose to shift it.

No one is the official boss of conversation tone, but we can take the lead any time we want. That afternoon it could have been me. But I took my cue from them, and all that did was keep the vibe where it was.

Some warmth from me might have moved them half a step. A ‘Hello, how’s the day going?’ without an edge does that sometimes. I’ve been moved by it myself, standing behind a counter at the end of a long shift. Sometimes even at the start of one.

It might also have done nothing. They may have been three hours from the end of a shift that had already had two people shout at them, in which case my small offering could have gone unnoticed.

What I know is which of us had the capacity to bring the warmth, and it wasn’t the person on shift.

That slow walk from me... nobody walks that slowly by accident. I wasn’t being calm… I was performing something at them, and it happened before I’d said a word.

Next time I’ll try harder to be warm and gentle, and set the standard.

Three things to try.

1. Notice the second before we match
There’s a small gap between reading someone’s tone and choosing to adopt it. It’s short, and it’s real, and most of the time we move through it without knowing it was there. Catching it is enough to start with.

2. Consider their context
The people who serve us get a few minutes with whoever turns up, and no say in who that is. Guessing at what the last customer was like is a fairer starting point than assuming their tone is about us.

3. Work out who can set the standard
In any short exchange, one of us usually has more capacity than the other. When it’s us, we can spend some. It might change nothing. But we can choose to do it anyway.

I bumped into a former colleague a little while ago.

We worked together about a decade back and had a good rapport, the kind that included conversations on topics outside work. Mutual respect, genuine warmth, and then one of us changed jobs and it fell away, the way these things do.

Seeing them was a real pleasure, and I was glad for the chance meeting. We said g’day, did a low-key high five, and stopped on the spot to catch up.

I asked about them first. How the family was, what work looked like now. They gave me the good stuff, open in the way people are in a catch-up, and then turned the questions back to me.

I started with work, which was easy, and there were good things to report. Then it moved outside work, and I pulled my punch. I gave the high-level version covering who’s doing what, where everyone’s up to. All accurate, but none of it the actual answer.

The honest answer is that some family things have been hard for a while, they’re still hard now, and they weigh on me most days.

I made that call to hold back in about a second. This was a warm reconnection standing on a footpath, and I didn’t want to bring the heavy thing into it in case it was too much for them.

Ten years ago, if the topic had come up at work, I’d have opened up a little, with a real answer.

I’m still not sure I got it right.

Nothing I said was false, which is the thing about the high-level version. It passes every test we usually apply to honesty. It’s accurate, it’s polite, it answers the question that was asked, but it also leaves the other person with a completely wrong picture of the year.

Mostly, I think it was the right call. A few minutes on a footpath doesn’t hold much. Something ten years old and warm is also a little fragile, and getting a little deep in conversation before the other person has had a chance to work out whether they want it or not is a lot to ask of a chance meeting.

We did say we’d organise something soon, and maybe that’s where it can come up. A second catch-up, a couple of months after an incidental first one, has more room for it.

Part of me though, thinks I underestimated them. They were open with me. Not about anything hard, as far as I know, though I didn’t ask a second question either. I took the good stuff and gave the good stuff back, and we both walked away with a nice feeling and no real-level insight.

If I’m honest, I can always find a reason not to be as open as I think would be meaningful. The setting is wrong, the timing is wrong, they’ve got enough on. Every one of those sounds like consideration, and some of them are. But that also keeps people slightly distant, and doesn’t give them the opportunity to offer an ear or support.

I pride myself on being real and human. It’s one of the few things I’d put my hand up and say I’m reasonably good at. Knowing when that’s too much for the moment is the part I still second-guess.

That colleague and I haven’t organised the second catch-up yet. It doesn’t need to be much, as we enjoyed hanging out when we worked together. A chat over a coffee, with time around it, might allow the harder part to come up on its own.

Whether I’d say it then is a different question.

Three things to try.

1. Notice the holding back as you do it.
When the high-level answer comes out, note what got left out.
No obligation to say it, but just become aware.

2. Ask what the moment can hold, rather than what the person can.
Most of the time we decide the other person doesn’t want it, when perhaps it’s the situation rather than them. Those are different reasons, and only one of them is about them.

3. Turn ‘we should organise something’ into a scheduled thing.
When a chance meeting ends that way, send the message the same week and put a time on it. Don’t let time slip away again if it’s someone whose company you enjoy.

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A couple of weeks ago, I let a very important deadline go. I was surprised at how effortless that decision came to be, and how guiltless I felt.

It was a writing competition, and it had been in the calendar and worked towards for months, especially in recent weeks. Placing in that competition would have meant a lot: publication, audience, prize money in the thousands. It would also come with sponsored time and space to write, and someone further along the publishing road reading my work and telling me what they saw in it. Those are the things that a writer working towards book publishing really wants and can be propelled forward through.

The deadline was worth something, and I knew it.

In those weeks beforehand, the writing schedule got reordered twice. Other life matters meant I slipped a day, then slipped another day.

Just as I was back on track, something else arrived that needed my full focus, and I tried to do both, still. For a few days I held onto the idea that I’d still make it. Determination to pursue a dream will do that.

But I couldn’t do both, and I eventually recognised that once I looked at the week ahead through logic, instead of through hope.

In previous years, this is the point where the heroics would kick in and I’d sacrifice to achieve something.

An all-nighter. Other 2am wake-ups and rewrites that feel like devotion in the moment, and torture the next day. I used to be really good at seeing a genuine shortage of hours and turning it into a test of character, producing something that wasn’t what I wanted it to be anyway, and turning up to everything else with nothing left.

But this time, once I got there, the whole decision-making window was about ten minutes. I looked at what was in front of me, worked out what I needed to properly focus on, and let the writing competition entry go. I made no plan to make it up and no promise about next year. What I settled on was pretty simple: this doesn’t fit, and pretending otherwise will cost more than the entry is worth.

I discovered that the perspective we choose when this happens is important.

Missing something is passive; it happens to us. The deadline went by, the week got away, the thing didn’t happen, and nobody had to decide anything.

Choosing not to meet something is a decision, and it’s the one most of us will do almost anything to avoid if we can, because a choice belongs to us in a way a slip doesn’t. We own it and choose it, rather than experience it.

I don’t want to make this sound easy, because it wasn’t.

Choosing to let this writing competition go was disappointing, and it still is. The opportunity was real and the piece I was working on was going somewhere… I loved it, and it’s there for me to pick back up another time.

What changed for me this time, unexpectedly, is what I did with the disappointment.

The old version of me would have turned it into evidence:
“Not organised enough. Not serious enough. Would have found the hours if I really wanted it. Look at all the people producing more with less.”

That conversation used to run for two or three days, and it never once produced a submitted entry. All it did was add a second hurt on top of the first one.

This time I let it just be disappointing, and I felt it for what it was: I wanted something, I couldn’t have it, and that’s sad. Sad is enough. Judging and condemning myself wouldn’t help me.

I’m not going to call this growth. Some of it might just be that at 44, I don’t have the energy the heroic version runs on, and saying that’s wisdom might be overstating what is just recognition.

What I needed to focus on got my attention and effort and time, and I’m glad I chose that.

Alongside that, the disappointment is still there. Smaller than it would have been, but it’s allowed to be there, too.

Three things to try.

1. Say it plainly.

   When something doesn’t get done, say to yourself, “There was only so much of me available, and this didn’t fit.”

2. Look at what the all-nighter actually produced.

   Think back to the last time we pushed through a night to make something happen. Look honestly at what came out of it, and at the two or three days afterwards. Rarely satisfying.

3. Let it just be disappointing.

   When we lose something we wanted, acknowledge that. We wanted a thing, we couldn’t have it, and that’s sad. Nothing else needs adding.

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Somewhere in a set of blood test and heart rate results from early 2012, there’s a number I was proud of for years.

My resting heart rate: low, steady, unflappable. The calm heart of an athlete, my GP said. The kind of heart that conserves itself and doesn’t move unless its owner decides to move it, he explained. He delivered it as good news, a small strength of mine amongst some challenging circumstances, and I took it exactly that way. Whatever was going on in my head, my body was apparently a picture of composure.

I’d gone to the GP because I’d been low and flat for the better part of a year, and had decided to see a doctor and pour my heart out. He listened, said what I was describing sounded like it could be depression, wrote a referral to a psychologist, and ordered the tests to rule out anything physical.

The heart rate was just an extra check on top of the real reason I was there. But it was the part I latched onto, because it was the one piece of the whole exercise that told me I was fine.

I used the referral, and I’ve been doing that work ever since. It’s the reason I understand the number differently now. That low, immovable heart wasn’t calm.

I was feeling almost nothing, because feeling had become too much, and my body was showing that… I was congratulated for the exact thing that needed looking at.

We tend to treat ongoing calm as a good thing. Someone who doesn’t lose it and is composed. Plenty of the time that composure is real and hard-won, and worth having. But it can also be suppression, and from the outside it looks identical.

Two people can go quiet in the same hard moment, and one of them is fully there, holding something strong without being knocked over by it, and the other has left the building and pulled the door shut behind them. To others, they look the same level of calm, but are very much not.

Steadiness is a better term for the first one. It’s active, stays, can hold and observe a big feeling without needing to shrink it or slip away from it.

In 2012 I wasn’t steady, I was a mess. I’d become so good at suppression that I’d stopped feeling much at all.

Not long ago I was with two other people while they talked through something personal. They’d decided I was safe to have there, which I understood and didn’t take lightly.

What I couldn’t work out was my job. There were three options and I ran through all of them: present and observing, present and contributing, or physically present and mentally somewhere else. I chose the first one.

Present and observing has a look to it. Attentive. Nodding at the right places. The body moving with what’s being said, leaning in when it gets hard, adjusting to the person talking because you’re listening and absorbing closely and adjust. A heart that does the same, lifting when the thing being said is heavy, settling when it eases.

By the end of the evening, I could see what I’d actually done. Sat there, mostly still. Not adjusting to anything, because I wasn’t listening closely enough to have anything to adjust to. My eyes were on them and slightly past them at the same time, distant. Resting heart rate the whole way through, because not much was getting in.

I’d chosen observing and delivered absence, and the two look similar. Present enough to be counted as present. Absent enough that nothing could be asked of me. It took the rest of the evening to get back to myself, which is the only reason I know I’d left. Nobody in that room would have described me as anything other than calm.

That’s the part I find hardest: the tell isn’t available while it’s happening. From the inside, the two feel similar enough that I can’t reliably identify it in the moment. The answer comes afterwards, in the tiredness of getting back, or in whether the person I was with felt met or felt handled.

At this point in time, my heart isn’t that same athlete-level of calm. A regular check-up at the GP a few months ago showed my heart rate a little high, though nothing to be concerned about. It was in the normal range, and only stands out to me because it wasn’t always that way.

Which tells me the number moved, and I’m perhaps a bit better connected to myself than I was then.

Three things to try.

1. Ask whether they felt met or managed.
After a hard conversation, the question worth asking is whether the other person felt us in it with them, or felt us handling them from behind a wall of calm. The answer is usually available if we’re willing to look for it, and occasionally we can just ask.

2. Notice the two kinds of quiet.
Fully present with something, compared to being there but slipping out the back while leaving the lights on. They feel different once we start looking for the difference.

3. Let one feeling show that we’d normally smooth over.
Something small and low-stakes. Visibly a bit annoyed, or a bit moved, instead of even. Steadiness doesn’t mean being an immovable Easter Island statue.

For a while we had a system.

A photo for the day, a series we’d watch once a week over FaceTime, an online game we played together when we had a moment. Small things to keep connected, and we built the system together, for a good reason.

The geographic distance between us was real, life was full at both ends, and the structure offered something we both wanted: more of each other across that distance. More texture, more variety, and more of the small reaches that make two people feel like they’re alongside each other when they can’t be physically.

It worked for a while.

Then gradually, it stopped being a source of connection and became a set of tasks. The daily photo had to be uploaded. The game moves had to be made. Watching the series didn’t properly get off the ground.

What began as a way of feeling connected turned into something we completed. The thoughts of each other that used to arrive on their own got pushed aside by the components built to carry them. It was a little bit before we said something, as there’s not really a good way to tell someone that the system you created to stay close, has started to feel like homework.

And here’s my part in it, which I have to write down or this whole piece is dishonest. I watched the system. I noticed when the photo arrived at 11pm instead of somewhere in the middle of the day. I noticed a game move sitting unplayed for two days, and I noticed when the series watching got rescheduled, and then rescheduled again. The structure gave me data, and I read it for meaning, which is not what it was built for and not what either of us wanted from it.

So we talked it over and decided to drop the system.

Shortly afterward, it was a Sunday afternoon. No prompt, no protocol. And my phone began lighting up with warmth and reach.

Messages about an audition they had. Their dog demanding back pats. Someone falling asleep on the couch before dinner. The ordinary texture of their afternoon and evening, including me in it, three hundred kilometres away.

Connection built on structure might keep us in contact, but it doesn’t always keep us close. The framework tells us when, and how often, to connect. But what most of us are actually hungry for is the unprompted reach. The message that didn’t have to happen but did because we were on their mind and they made the effort to let us know.

What I had wrong for years, across various relationships of differing nature, is this:

I thought unprompted reach was a thing you could build your way to, to train into habit.

That if the structure was good enough, and we ran it faithfully enough, the wanting to reach would follow. That a person who checks in because you’ve asked for it enough will adopt it as habit.

When the warmth thinned out, my default was to reach for architecture. More contact, better contact, a system to hold it. Embed things and make them ‘normal’. And I’d defend that system past the point where either of us was enjoying it.

But the truth I have come to accept is that we can schedule contact, but we can’t schedule being thought about or reached toward.

We can say that we’d like more of it, and things might adjust for a while. After that, it can only be received. Someone reaches for us of their own accord, or they don’t.

Wanting to be thought of and reached for is healthy, by the way. We don’t have to be falsely positive or fiercely independent and try and convince ourselves we don’t need it. We do.

Wanting to be in someone’s mind, and wanting the evidence of it, is one of the most fundamental human needs there is. The need isn’t the problem. The problem is what we do when it isn’t being met.

Over time, that unmet need is real information, and we’re allowed to take it seriously. To notice how often it happens, how it feels when it doesn’t, and to decide what we want to do with that information.

That’s the uncomfortable end of this. There’s nothing to build. There’s only what arrives or doesn’t, and what we make of it.

Three things to try.

1. Notice what’s driving the reach.

   The next time you message someone, ask honestly: am I thinking of them, or do I want them to think of me? Both are fine, but the distinction is worth knowing.
   

2. Look at what your systems are protecting.

   Most of us have one somewhere. A standing call, a check-in, a contact ritual we keep. Ask what it’s actually holding up, and what you’d be afraid of if it stopped.
   

3. Follow the small thought.

   When someone crosses your mind, follow it to a message. Not a long one. The dog, the audition, the person asleep on the couch. The content isn’t the point; expressing the thought of them is.

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Toward the end of a long and at times heavy conversation, I read my partner a silly list.

It was from Instagram: one of those posts that circulates periodically about what makes relationships work, and it was a collection of small, absurd habits that can add some levity. Butt-slapping competitions, kitchen dancing, animal noises when you’re annoyed, having a code word for when stress has peaked, and someone needs to tap out.

I read it out loud after a long discussion about something warm but heavy, and we both laughed. The vibe lightened in a way that didn’t sweep the previous topic under the rug, but sat alongside it. We both felt lighter, and it sat with me as a useful thing to keep versions of in my back pocket.

That shift felt important. Nothing got fixed by the list, and the hard things were still hard. But the evening ended differently.

I haven’t always done that. There have been times I’ve left the heavy stuff to sit between us, particularly when I’ve been asking something of my partner. Holding the seriousness of it, keeping the weight in the room. What I can see now is that doing that can deny both of us the chance to feel more than heavy. I could have been warmer, for both our benefit, and wasn’t.

It reminded me of how we can settle into thinking of playfulness and seriousness as opposites. Serious conversations, serious relationships, serious people: these things don’t often get associated with butt-slapping competitions and animal noises. Play is for when nothing important is going on. When you can afford to be silly.

Or is it?

Playfulness isn’t the absence of seriousness, it’s evidence that we can hold both. That people can go deep into the difficult stuff and then, at the other end of it, return to being the particular kind of fun they are as people.

The capacity to play is a sign of safety. Animals play when they feel safe. Children play when they feel safe. Research on adult relationships points in the same direction: couples who can be silly together tend to be more resilient. Silliness is a sign that the underlying bond is strong and can hold both weight and lightness in balance.

We can’t force this, though. Playfulness that’s performed rather than felt is its own kind of loneliness. The cliche version of this is the gear-shifting question: desert island companions, dream dinner party guests, that kind of thing. We reach for them because they’re known as mood-lighteners, but because they’re known as mood-lighteners, we both see through them. The moment becomes a performance of trying to go lighter rather than actually going there. Performed playfulness is managing the other person’s discomfort rather than sharing your own lightness. Those are different acts, and people can feel the difference.

You know when it’s real because it arrives without effort: a thought followed immediately by a laugh, a moment that didn’t need to be engineered.

But we can create conditions for it. We can notice when we’ve been very serious for a long time and ask whether we’re avoiding the light or just forgetting it’s available. We can give ourselves permission to be a bit ridiculous with the people we love, even when the stakes feel high. Especially when they do.

The playful list wasn’t a diversion. It was a kind of proof that we could sit together in something heavy and then, at the other end of it, still be people who laugh at animal noises and butts.

I’m still working out the calibration: how silly is useful, how absurd is too far. Pitch it wrong and instead of lightening the room, you’ve just left the other person wondering whether your faculties have vacated the premises. But that’s the ongoing experiment. Finding the degree of ridiculousness that enables a genuine shift, rather than a confused one.

The list was from Instagram, which is a strange place for something that turned out to matter. But here we are.

Three things to try.

1. Bring one small silly thing.

   Think of a relationship that’s been mostly serious lately. Find one small ridiculous thing to bring into it this week, as a reminder of who you are together when things are lighter.

2. Notice the real laughs.

   Pay attention to the moments in your relationships when you genuinely laugh. The real kind of laughing, the kind that catches you.
   What creates that? It’s worth knowing.

3. Make a code word.

   If there’s a recurring high-stress dynamic with someone in your life, try agreeing on a word for when you’ve both hit the wall.
   Make it absurd. The absurdity is the point. It gives you both somewhere to go that isn’t further into the difficulty.

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My father died when I was sixteen. He never taught me to shave, but I figured it out eventually. The way you figure out most things nobody showed you: badly at first, then adequately, then you can do it without thinking about it.

At some point the absence of that guidance recedes into the background. It was a self-learned thing, you wish someone had shown you, but so be it.

Becoming a parent though, reveals those missing moments again, from the other side. This time around, we get to be the one who does the teaching, to offer some of what we once needed.

For the longest time, I had been looking forward to teaching my eldest son to shave. To show him what no-one had shown me meant something big and special.

I’d half-planned it well in advance, the way we do when we assume something will simply happen. I’d bought him a decent razor, some shaving foam, and could see so clearly, standing beside him in the bathroom, handing over little squares of toilet paper for the inevitable cuts a first shave produces.

As things turned out, he didn’t want me to show him. That’s ok. His call, and I respect that. No protesting or guilt-tripping.

I bought him a good electric shaver for Christmas, and he appreciated it. My son was now equipped, and I’d given him a good tool to do the job. I felt proud.

A little part of me longed for the shared teaching moment, though. The procedural, rite-of-passage ritual of it. It was something I’d missed out on and had attached significance to.

Even with the grace of adapting to how things unfolded, I had to sit with something I didn’t quite have a name for. I wasn’t mourning the past. I was mourning a plan. Is that even a thing?

There’s an honesty about this kind of mourning that takes some sitting with to accept: this kind of grief is entirely made by us.

It’s about our lost plan and hope, about an expectation that wasn’t ours to set. My son wasn’t obligated to play the part in my sentimentally-loaded plan. I had written the script for how I wanted things to go, and nobody else was compelled to go along with it.

And alongside that, I was the child who didn’t get to do something, and became the parent who wanted to impart that same thing from the other side.

Sitting with both of these things honestly and acknowledging it is healthy. We are allowed to be sad about twice missing out on something that we came to attach value to.

Because the present grief rhymes with the older one. They are two different losses, pulling toward each other, though they aren’t the same wound.

For a while I managed that grief instead of feeling it fully. I sat with it so carefully, so deliberately, so consciously observing myself, that I went a little numb. Without meaning to, I had turned feeling into watching. It caught up with me though, as suppressed emotions usually do. With interest.

My therapist put it simply: let it be what it is, and feel what it feels like. Be in it and stop just noticing it. I had to actually move through the loss, even if to some it seems silly. It was a big thing to me, and that’s ok. Something I was looking forward to didn’t happen. That’s allowed to hurt.

The do-overs we sometimes get don’t always arrive on schedule or look like what we might want. It’s ok to feel things about this. The grief of the plan is allowed to be its own thing, separate from the older losses it feels like.

There will be other moments and plans that do happen.

But first, the plan that didn’t come good is allowed to be a loss, and not a lesson or a reframe. Something mattered, and it didn’t happen.

Three things to try.

1. Separate the rhyming griefs.
   When a current grief feels like an older one, write them down separately. Two columns, two losses, two dates.
   Name what’s actually happening now before the older one pulls it under. They might rhyme, but they’re not the same wound.

2. Notice if you’ve turned feeling into observing.
   Next time you’re sitting with something hard, ask: am I in this, or am I watching myself be in it?
   If it’s the second, try putting down the analysis for ten minutes. No naming, no framing. Just the feeling, whatever shape it takes.

3. Name the plan out loud.
   If there’s a plan that didn’t come good, say it plainly to someone, or write it down: this is what I wanted, this is what I’d imagined, and it didn’t happen. As a fact that deserves to be stated before it gets filed away as ‘fine’.

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Parts 1 and 2 of this series were about the active side of phone use: checking for evidence that we matter to someone, and scrolling away from feelings we’d rather not sit with. Both are about what the phone does for us in the moment we reach for it.

This one is about what happens in the moment just before we reach for it.

There’s a specific state that most of us now spend very little time in. It’s the gap between tasks, between thoughts, between the end of one thing and the beginning of the next. A few minutes of nothing in particular. Uncomfortable enough that the instinct is to close it, quickly, before it gets any louder. And the phone is designed precisely for that moment: immediate, reliable, asking nothing of us.

One reach for our phone, and the gap is gone. What’s also gone is whatever the gap might have lead to.

Because the gap isn’t empty. It’s where something else happens, and we’ve quietly arranged our lives so it almost never gets the chance.

A few months ago I was lying on my bed, too early for sleep, too restless to read, too impatient for a show or film. The usual exits were there, as was my phone. But that particular evening none of them had any pull, so I just lay in the uncomfortable middle of nothing in particular, too mentally fidgety to even opt for a scroll on my phone.

Calm, mostly. came from that evening.
Not from a scheduled creative session, or a well-rested Sunday morning with a notebook.

But from a Tuesday night of restlessness I couldn’t close, a gap I couldn’t fill, a state I was stuck in long enough that the mind stopped waiting for input and started doing something with the quiet instead. A name formed. Then a direction. Then a sense of something I wanted to build.

None of that was available earlier in the evening, when everything was fuller. It came through the boredom gap, and only because the gap had been left long enough to turn into something: tilled soil, waiting for a thought to drop in and take root.

The crispest ideas I’ve had, in writing and in work, have come from that same place. A particular kind of exhaustion and listlessness that tips into something else. A creative famishment, where the mind has run out of things to process and starts generating its own.

That state has a prerequisite. The gap has to be allowed to exist, and to deepen, past the point where it’s comfortable.

The phone closes it before that point arrives, almost every time.

This isn’t about distraction in the usual sense, as we’ve all heard that the phone distracts us. What’s harder to see is the timing of it: the specific moment it intervenes.

The boredom gap doesn’t need to last long before it becomes uncomfortable. A few minutes of stillness is enough for the mind to start producing things we’d rather not sit with: the weight of an unfinished task, the low hum of something we need to do, the vague feeling of not knowing what to do next. The instinct is to close that gap before whatever’s in there gets any louder.

The phone is perfectly designed for that moment. One reach and it’s gone. What we’ve stopped noticing is the cost of that. The creative and cognitive cost of a gap that never gets to run.

There’s an older word for what happens in a protected gap: incubation. The period between identifying a problem and arriving at a solution, where the logical mind steps back and something else takes over. It’s well documented and widely understood, and almost nobody protects it anymore, because protecting it means tolerating the discomfort that makes it possible.

We used to tolerate that discomfort by default. In a time before mobile phones, there was nothing as immediately stimulating to our senses. The queue, the commute, the waiting room: these were forced gaps, and the mind filled them the only way it could. Now every one of those gaps has an instant exit, and we take it. The incubation doesn’t happen, and we wonder why ideas feel thinner than they used to.

The phone isn’t the only exit option, but it is the most available, the most reliable, and the most socially invisible. Nobody notices us closing the gap. We barely notice it ourselves.

What I’ve started doing is leaving some gaps alone, as an experiment in what surfaces when the gap is allowed to run.

Sometimes nothing grows from it, and that’s ok. Sometimes the discomfort just sits there and then passes, and I might still pick up the phone. But sometimes something comes through that couldn’t have arrived any other way. A line, or a direction. A thing I needed to know that I wouldn’t have found by looking for it.

The gap has to close eventually, and that’s not the point. What is, is that we get to decide how and when we close it. Just by pausing and stepping off the ‘reach for the phone’ autopilot script we’ve embedded within ourselves.

The phone will always be there when we reach for it. That’s the one guarantee of the whole arrangement. The question is whether we reach before the gap has finished what it started.

Most of the time, we do. Most of the time, by a long way.

Three things to try.

1. Leave one gap alone this week.
   A commute, a queue, a few minutes before sleep. No phone, no podcast, no input of any kind. Notice what the mind does when it runs out of things to process.

2. Track what arrives in the nothing.
   Keep something nearby to capture whatever surfaces in an unstructured moment: a note, a voice memo, a scrap of paper. Not to force it. Just to notice whether something comes through that wouldn’t have arrived any other way.

3. Notice the timing of the reach.
   The next time you pick up the phone without a specific reason, ask how long the gap had been open. Ten seconds? Two minutes? The answer is usually shorter than you’d expect.

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There’s a difference between checking our phones and scrolling on them.

Checking is directed. We open the app because something specific is waiting, for us, or we think there could be. There’s something to find out. A particular piece of information, and purpose, for us to grab the phone.

Scrolling is different, in that it has no goal. The thumb moves, the screen changes, and nothing in particular is being sought. We’re passing time and open to whatever we see that grabs our attention. And that is what this piece is about… the scrolling for the sake of it.

If I’m fully honest with myself, I scroll when I want to step away from whatever’s going on (or not going on) for me at that time. Avoiding housework, not feeling something I don’t want to feel, or wanting to feel a bit soothed by something I’ve come to find relaxing.

For a while there it was time-lapse lawn mowing videos (impressive and calming), then cow hoof trimming videos (restoring comfort for beautiful animals), and at the moment it’s bushcraft shelter-making videos (some of them are incredible!). I find them a good way to daydream about the cubbies I wish I’d made as a kid.

But in those moments of wanting to see something other than what’s in front of me, I don’t always reach for something specific. I just pick up the phone and start moving through content. Anything, really, so that I’m looking away from the room or feeling I’m sitting in. The scroll is a door out of a moment I’d rather not fully be in.

This is regulation of a kind. Not a sophisticated kind, but a real one. Our nervous system is uncomfortable, and our phone provides a change of scene: a reliable, low-effort change when what’s in front of us feels too much.

Why acknowledge it, and write about it? Because it’s worth understanding what we’re actually asking the phone to do, because that helps us understand why it keeps feeling insufficient.

What it costs

The scroll soothes briefly, and that’s real. But it also has a delayed cost that’s easy to miss in the moment.

The first cost is whatever we’ve avoided. When we scroll away from something, it doesn’t go away, it just waits. We come back to it in roughly the same state we left it, except now we’ve spent twenty minutes somewhere else. Sometimes slightly worse, because we’ve added the background hum of everything we absorbed in the scroll to whatever was already sitting there.

The second cost is the quality of the rest. Scrolling before sleep, which most of us do and most of us know is counterproductive, isn’t really about sleep hygiene. It’s about the avoided thing being loudest when everything else goes quiet. The scroll is the last act of avoidance for the day, before the mind ruminates on the avoided thing anyway.

The third cost is harder to pinpoint, but it’s probably the relationship between difficulty and capacity. The more reliably we escape discomfort via the phone, the less practice we get at sitting with it.

Our tolerance doesn’t build. The next uncomfortable moment arrives, and our reflex is the same, and we avoid, rather than increase what we can sit with, and how much we can handle.

What’s actually going on

The emotional drivers behind scrolling and checking are different, but they share something. The phone is the path of least resistance when sitting with something feels like too much.

For checking, the underlying need is connection. For scrolling, the underlying need is relief. Neither can fully deliver. But both are always available, and that’s the problem.

I did this recently when an important conversation hadn’t finished the way I wanted, and instead of sitting with it, I picked up the phone.

Twenty minutes of bushcraft videos later, nothing had shifted. The conversation was still unfinished. I was still in the same room with the same feelings, I’d just been briefly somewhere else.

That’s not a verdict on the scroll.

Sometimes briefly being somewhere else is what we need. But it helps to know the impact of what we’re doing, because the phone will always be there when we reach for it, and it will always offer a door.

Knowing why we open it is available to us.

Three things to try.

1. Name what we’re scrolling away from.
When we notice ourselves reaching for our phones without a specific reason, we can pause and ask: what would we rather not be fully in right now?
We don’t have to fix it. Just naming it helps.

2. Give the discomfort a time limit.
If something is sitting with us, try setting a ten-minute window to actually sit with it before reaching for the phone. Let it exist without immediately leaving. This is harder than it sounds, and worth trying.

3. Notice what the scroll produces.
After a session of scrolling that started from that reaching-away place, notice honestly what we feel. Lighter? The same? Slightly worse? Whatever we notice is information.

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I had a habit, for a while, of checking who had viewed my Instagram stories.

Specifically looking for particular names and patterns. Proof that people were interested in my life even when they weren’t reaching out. Evidence that I existed to them, essentially.

Yes, I know how that sounds and I knew it at the time. But for reasons of feeling low and unimportant, I did it anyway. What I was looking for couldn’t be found anywhere else in that moment, and the phone was available.

I don’t think this is unusual. I think most of us, at some point, have used our phones this way, to soothe something. To check whether we’re thought of, and find quiet proof that we are, in some mind somewhere, present.

The problem is that the phone is very bad at this job.

Sometimes the data is there, and someone viewed the story. Someone liked the post or opened the message. But data is not the thing we’re actually looking for, it’s a poor proxy.

A view count can’t produce that feeling. It only tells you someone’s thumb stopped scrolling. It doesn’t tell you what they were thinking or feeling when it did. The view or open isn’t evidence of the thing we’re using it as evidence for.

The checking doesn’t resolve the ache, though it might temporarily soothe it, the way scratching an itch does: briefly, and then not.

I’ve noticed this urge usually arises in a moment of particular aloneness. A time when someone I care about isn’t reachable or present, or at a distance I didn’t choose. And my nervous system, which is well practised at looking for signals, goes looking for them. The phone is just where the signals live now.

What’s helped is not trying to stop checking, because willpower fails when the ache is loudest. It’s noticing the impulse first and asking myself, ‘What am I actually looking for right now?’

Sometimes that pause and reflection is enough. Once we sit with it a moment, the phone becomes obviously inadequate for the job. This doesn’t necessarily mean we will put it down. But we do stop pretending it’s going to give us what we actually need.

The ache is real, and when it’s big, the checking is understandable. But the phone just can’t do the thing we’re asking it to do.

Three things to try.

1. Name it before we check.
The next time we feel the pull toward something specific on our phones, pause for ten seconds first, and name what we’re actually looking for, the feeling underneath. Just naming it makes a difference.

2. Watch what the checking produces.
If we have a habit of checking something or someone’s engagement, notice honestly what it produces. Temporary relief? More anxiety? Whatever it produces is information about whether the behaviour is serving us.

3. Try the other thing first.
Identify one thing that genuinely makes us feel less alone and more grounded. Try that before checking our phone the next time the impulse comes. It doesn’t have to work every time. Even just ‘some times’ is good progress.

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A friend mentioned in passing that they might skip their sister’s birthday dinner. They were tired, the week had been long, the drive was forty minutes each way. I could tell it had been sitting with them.

They weren’t asking what I thought, just thinking out loud.

I empathised, because I’ve been in that place where you’re trying to weigh what you want to do against what you know you probably ‘should’. Over the years, I’ve gone both ways on it. Shown up, and not shown up. The deciding factor, in more recent times, wasn’t how tired I actually was. It was whether I’d asked myself the right question before I responded to the invitation.

The question that shapes the answer

The question I’ve learned to ask involves a reversal of perspective: putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

I ask myself, if the situation were flipped and it was my birthday dinner, and my friend or sibling was the tired one with the forty-minute drive: would I want them to come?

The answer, for most of us, comes quickly. Yes, of course.

After this first question comes the more important one: am I the kind of person who shows up for the people I love, in the way I’d want them to show up for me?

This isn’t guilt, or a trap. It’s an opportunity to make a conscious choice about a principle, and then to let that principle do the work of guiding the decision. The tiredness becomes a logistics question we can plan around in advance, not the deciding factor on the day. We can rest around it.

That shift, from whether to how, is what a consciously chosen principle actually does. And it works in both directions, something I’ll come back to.

When the irritation is real too

My daughter plays netball most Sunday mornings. There’s another parent I see most weeks, someone I’ve gotten to know a bit over a season of sidelines and scoresheets. A few months ago, outside of that context, she reached out and asked if I’d be willing to read over a funding submission she’d been working on for a few months, that she was putting together for a community project. It wasn’t something I had any involvement in, and she needed it back within a couple of days.

My honest first reaction, if I’m being honest about it, was a familiar internal resistance. I had things of my own on, and the timing wasn’t great.

But before I responded, I reversed it.

If I’d spent the better part of three months on something, and needed someone with a fresh set of eyes to look it over before it went somewhere important, would I want someone to say yes? Without question. And to be seen as someone who could offer some value there is a compliment, too.

So the question then becomes, am I someone who shows up for people the way I’d want them to show up for me?

I read the submission that evening.

What I noticed doing it that way, is that the resistance didn’t disappear, as the timing challenge was still real. But it stopped being the deciding factor, because I’d already made the bigger decision. The principle was already in place, and that moment just asked me to honour it.

What this actually is

This isn’t about discovering who you are. Most of us have a reasonable sense of that already.

It’s about deciding, in advance of the response, which version of yourself you’re committing to: the one who defaults to what’s easiest in the moment, or the one who pauses to check whether that choice is consistent with something they’ve already decided.

Looking at things this way makes decisions easier. It removes us-at-that-moment from the centre of the decision. When we’re tired, or busy, or mildly irritated, we become the most important variable in our own reasoning.

The reversal helps us step outside ourselves to consider, if we weren’t the one being asked, what would we want? And from there, the question becomes whether we’re genuinely living with integrity toward our own stated principles, or only when it’s convenient.

The reversal works in the other direction too. The same question that asks whether we’re showing up also asks whether the people we’re turning up for extend the same consideration to us. If the honest answer, over time, is that they don’t, that’s information.

A principle isn’t a contract we keep regardless of what’s returned. It’s a reflection of who we want to be, and part of that is knowing when a relationship has quietly become one-sided. We don’t have to manufacture obligation toward people who have long since stopped applying the same standard to us.

Releasing ourselves from that isn’t a failure of principle, or selfishness. It’s how we protect the energy we need to show up well for the people and moments that are genuinely mutual.

Done consistently, this is how our decisions in ordinary moments become our character.

Who we are is a direct result of whether we make the forty-minute drive for someone who also cares about us, or read the submission for someone kind on a busy week, or the hundred other moments that feel small at the time, but actually show who we are.

The big choice of our principles comes first. The ordinary moments just ask us to follow through.

Three things to try.

1. Name one principle you want to commit to.
Something specific, not aspirational. Not ‘I want to be a better friend’ but ‘I show up for the people I love the way I’d want them to show up for me.’
The more concrete the commitment, the more useful it is when a moment arrives.

2. Run the reversal before you respond.
Next time a request or situation arrives that produces resistance, pause before answering. Flip the scenario and notice what you’d want. Then ask whether your response is consistent with that.

3. Separate the logistics from the decision.
Once the principle is named, treat the practical obstacles as logistics, not as the decision itself. Tiredness is a logistics question. Whether to go is already answered.

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There’s a version of waiting that is genuinely passive, where something is set down and perhaps forgotten about, and whether it comes back up stops mattering.

But there’s another kind, a harder kind of waiting, where it’s necessary and really difficult to ride out. The kind where we care very much, and are choosing every hour or so, not to do anything about it. Because we know that doing something active to reduce this kind of waiting isn’t the right move, and we’re holding to that knowledge while everything in us is saying otherwise.

This kind of waiting is exhausting, because sitting back takes more out of us than stepping up and acting on it would.

The kind that costs something

I have a dynamic in my life where this kind of waiting is necessary, and has been for a long while. The other person is choosing space and only engaging where engagement is unavoidable. The waiting and the space are not at all comfortable for me. My instinct is to reach, to explain, to clarify, to fix, to ask how they feel and what they’re thinking, and share my feelings and thoughts too. But the thing I have to do, over and over, is notice that instinct and choose not to follow it.

If you have a situation like this in your own life, you know the instinct comes from a real place. From love and care, and wanting things to be easier and more complete. But the kindest and most generous thing we can do is to stay in our own lane, be present and available, and trust them to find their own way through.

The difficulty is that this kind of waiting looks and feels like doing nothing. We’re living our ordinary life, going to work, eating dinner, reading or watching something at night, while quietly managing an enormous and overwhelming amount of internal noise.

It’s hard to sit with that level of hurt, discomfort and fear. But we need to do it, because the other person’s process matters more right now than our need to resolve the discomfort.

What we do instead

I’ve had to learn, slowly, that the impulse to reach under pressure is usually for me rather than the other person. Sometimes it’s anxiety wearing the costume of care. Sometimes the most caring thing is to sit still and wait.

This is a practised and difficult skill, and we often fall short along the way.

What helps is having somewhere to put the energy. Movement. Small tasks that belong entirely to our own lives. Conversations with people who are genuinely available. Investing time in our own interests. Anything that reminds us that we are people with hearts and thoughts and lives that exist independently of the thing or person we’re waiting on.

What doesn’t help is looking for evidence. Looking for signals that will tell us which way things are going, so we can stop waiting and start responding. This feels like information-gathering, but is usually just a way of side-stepping the hardness of not-knowing.

Sitting with the ambiguity and staying available, while continuing to live our own life, is the right thing. It’s just a shame it’s also the hardest.

What it actually is

Waiting is an act of faith. The kind of faith where we decide that the situation, the other person or thing, deserves more than forcing a resolution before it’s ready. We can’t rush what needs time to grow.

It does cost us a lot though. Real waiting asks us to feel something we don’t want to feel, and to accept something we feel could be better and different if we just did something about it.

On the other side of this waiting, if we come through, there’s something real either way. We didn’t collapse. We didn’t push. We held steady while something may or may not have been resolved.

That waiting with faith and grace is what steadiness actually looks and feels like. Messy on the inside, but building a capacity for calm with each occasion we’re asked to sit and wait.

Three things to try.

1. Name what you’re doing.
The next time you’re in a period of active waiting, try saying it plainly to yourself: I am doing a hard thing. I am choosing not to act when everything says to. Naming it as effort is more honest than treating it as passivity.

2. Check the impulse.
The next time you feel the urge to reach, check, or follow up on something that isn’t yours to push, pause for ten minutes first. The goal isn’t suppression. Just see whether the urge changes shape when you give it a moment.

3. Find your anchors.
Make a short list of things that are genuinely yours, regardless of how any particular situation resolves. Things that belong to you no matter what. Return to that list when the waiting gets loud.

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I nearly didn’t go.

There were nine of us heading out for coffee, or so the message thread said, and I was the holdout. I was at the end of a row of desks with things to do, and the pull was to stay there: I’m not in the mood, I’ll catch up another time, it’s only half an hour.

The eighth person to leave walked past my desk on the way out. They didn’t make a thing of it, just asked again, casually, on the way past.

I almost said no again. I’d said no to the first person who asked, had it ready to go again in a way that would be reasonable and not read as rejection. ‘I’m good, you guys go.’ I had fair and reasonable grounds for declining, all lined up like books on a shelf.

But underneath the reasons, something quieter was saying go. Steadily, the way a small gut feeling keeps popping up even when the other parts of you are talking over it.

My brain pushed back on my gut. You’re tired. You’ve got things to do. You’re not in the mood.

Go anyway, my gut said. Firmly, but kindly.

I very nearly gave in to the louder voice, because it had momentum and my gut was asking me to do something my mind didn’t want to do. Against my own resistance, I stood up and went.

It was a clear day, not too warm and not too cold. The coffee smell hit us as we walked in. The whole group seemed to have arrived at the same unspoken agreement: relax, talk about anything except work. Nobody mentioned the minestrone soup of projects we were all working on. Everyone was in the mindset to create exactly what we all needed, which I’m going to admit was something I needed too, even though I’d been about to skip it.

Half an hour later I was back at my desk. Something small had shifted, and I felt a bit more like a person. Less siloed and more part of something. I felt welcomed and embraced and seen. I hadn’t realised until right then that I wasn’t feeling those things beforehand. It was a little overwhelming to acknowledge.

The small yes matters more than we think.

That small yes is closer to the truth of how connection gets built than most of the bigger, more intentional things I tend to focus on.

We have a story about building a social life that involves grand gestures and deliberate effort. Joining a club, reaching out to a friend we’ve lost touch with, organising a dinner. These things matter and they also require energy, coordination, and a certain mental readiness. A lot of the time we don’t have those things, so we kick the can down the road, until we’re in a better headspace, or until things settle down.

Meanwhile, people keep walking past our desks, and friends go on eating dinner in their own homes rather than together.

The small yes is unglamorous. It’s going for coffee when we were going to stay behind. It’s stopping for a conversation in a corridor instead of keeping our heads down. It’s replying to the message that would be easy to leave on read. In many cases it can feel like just doing what we need to get through the day.

In truth though, this is how most real social worlds get made. The everyday building happens in small choices to be slightly more present than strictly necessary.

The friction sits in that word, ‘necessary’. In most of these moments, nobody’s requiring the half-hour coffee. Nobody will notice if we stay at our desks. The cost of the small no is usually invisible, which is exactly why we default to it without thinking.

I want to be honest about my own version of this. Most of the time, when I say no to the small thing, I tell myself it’s because I’m busy, or tired, or focused. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the real reason is actually that I don’t want to make the small effort. I’d rather conserve myself and stay inside the day I’d already constructed in my head. The story I tell about being busy is more flattering than the story about being worried my presence will become a regret others come to have.

The cost of the small no, when repeated, is real. It’s the gradual narrowing of a life, the slow reduction of ordinary contact, until the only meaningful relationships are the ones that involve scheduling and effort, and the spontaneous, easy, human stuff has quietly stopped happening.

More small yeses.

What I’ve been trying to do more of lately is lower the bar for saying yes to participation. Yes to a coffee and chat. Yes to sitting in the lunchroom with others. Yes to changing the evening’s plans from the lower-key comfort I had semi-prepared myself for, to what would offer more fun and connection.

The person who walked past my desk that day didn’t know they were doing me a favour. They were just heading for coffee with some others, but they changed my day and the couple of months since.

The butterfly effect of that possibly-casual re-invitation from them is that I now consciously embrace more spontaneity and a little less structured scheduling. It’s made a very big difference.

The small yes is usually right there. Most of the time we just need to say ‘yes’ before we talk ourselves out of it.

Three things to try.

1. Catch one small no this week.
Notice one moment where we default to skipping, staying, or leaving a message unread. Ask honestly whether the cost of the yes was actually as high as we were treating it.

2. Initiate first.
Identify someone in our orbit who tends to be the one making contact. Try going first, just once.

3. Start small, not big.
If we’re in a period of feeling less connected than we’d like, resist the pull toward a big gesture to fix it. One coffee. One conversation. One message. The accumulation matters more than any single moment.

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A couple of years ago I drafted an apology message three times in my Notes app, and didn’t send any of them.

The first version was too long. The second one started with an apology that wasn’t quite the apology I meant. The third one was shorter and better, but I closed the app anyway and went and made coffee, and by the time I’d finished the coffee, I’d talked myself out of sending it.

The thing I was trying to repair wasn’t a catastrophe. It was an unfortunate clash of events which meant I couldn’t attend something important despite RSVPing ‘yes’ and fully intending to go.

Something family-related came up the day before and I was needed elsewhere. Unfortunate, and the way life sometimes goes.
Time passed… six weeks, possibly eight. I’d lost count and allowed myself to forget, which says something else about my effort to acknowledge the impact.

There’s probably one of these situations sitting somewhere in most people’s lives right now.

Something that didn’t happen, or did and wasn’t what was hoped, or we let someone down, or lost our steadiness with someone we love. Where the moment passed and life continued, and a slight carefulness moved in afterwards. A topic that without discussing it, we’ve silently agreed to leave alone.

These quiet, unrepaired things are often more costly than the dramatic ones, because they’re easy to step around and not touch. And where acknowledgement and repair don’t follow a bump, resentment always builds, even if we’re not consciously aware of it.

What it actually costs.

The unrepaired thing doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of the architecture of the relationship we have with that person.

It creates a slight wariness, a small no-go zone, a pattern of moving carefully around something neither person has raised. Over time, these accumulate and the relationship gradually narrows.

There’s an internal cost too, because carrying an unrepaired thing takes energy. Not a lot, but ongoing. A background task we’ve avoided that occasionally surfaces as a flash of discomfort, sitting there using mental resources we could deploy elsewhere.

The conversation, when we finally have it, often takes about ten minutes if we both enter it openly and listen kindly. But the carefulness has been there for months. Take the hard step and save yourself time lost to pretending or ignoring.

What actually makes it hard.

The real barrier is usually one of three things.

1. Not knowing how to start. The conversation has been unaddressed long enough that going back feels like a big move.

2. Fear of the response. The unspoken thing has existed in ambiguity. Naming it risks a response we’re not ready for.

3. The quiet hope things have resolved themselves. Time has passed and things seem ok on the surface. And we think maybe going back would just reopen something that’s actually closed.

That last one is the most appealing and usually the least accurate, and often the most damaging.

Surface level ok is not the same as repaired and ‘good again’. The carefulness is still there, and we can feel it if we look.

What finally moved it.

The thing that moved me was something smaller and more annoying.

I was having a conversation unrelated to that, and I caught myself editing a sentence on the way out of my mouth. Removing a half-honest opinion because it touched, very lightly, on the territory of the thing still sitting between me and the other person. The edit took less than a second and I almost didn’t notice it.

But I did notice it. And once I’d noticed it, I noticed I’d been doing it for weeks. I was already shrinking the relationship to protect myself from a conversation I hadn’t had yet.

I went back to it that evening. Not by message in the end, even though I’d drafted one. By voice note, of all things, because writing it kept making it worse and I needed the unrehearsed version.

I didn’t get the opening right. I started with context I didn’t need to give, then doubled back, then said the thing I’d actually wanted to say, which was that I hadn’t handled it well and I’d been sitting with that.

The reply came an hour later. It was short and warm, and the carefulness was gone.

The first sentence, the one I’d rehearsed for weeks, wasn’t the best version, but it is the one that matters, because it was the one I actually expressed. Took a step forward instead of standing still. A clumsy expression of something real is worth far more than a polished sentence we never say.

Good people know this and allow for us to stumble a bit in delivery, because the substance is the real bit. They forgive the pause where we doubled back, the tone that was a bit less measured than we wanted it to be, the voice note that was probably too long. They allow for human missteps because they recognise the care and intention underneath it, and they welcome it.

Moving toward repair, even awkwardly, is better than moving nowhere.

Three things to try.

1. Name it to yourself first.
Before going back to someone, reflect objectively on what actually happened. Not your version of events, but the impact to them, irrespective of what your intention was. What did the other person likely experience? What was left unacknowledged? Write it down if it helps.

2. Find the first sentence, then stop polishing it.
The hardest part of a delayed repair is starting. The first sentence doesn’t need to be the best version, it just needs to be one we’ll actually say. Some examples to try: ‘I’ve been thinking about something that happened’, or ‘I don’t think I handled something well and I’d like to go back to it.’ One sentence. The rest will follow.

3. If they’re not ready.
Sometimes we go back and the other person isn’t in a place to receive it. The offer of repair has value even if it’s not immediately accepted. Leave the door open without pushing it. Sometimes repair happens in stages, and the first step is simply letting the other person know we’re willing to take one.

I started doing stand-up in 2016, which was the same year my marriage ended and I had a breakdown.

I didn’t walk onto a stage because I was in good shape, but because I wanted to talk about the funny things as well as the hard things, and I needed somewhere that combination of honesty and stubborn hope might be welcomed.

I found it. And I found a new love for life that would sustain me through some hard times.

What I didn’t expect though, was how much it would teach me about the thing I was also trying to learn in therapy (which I value enormously, continue to do, and am not about to poo on).

There’s something being on the stage with your stories and feelings does, that I haven’t found anywhere else.

And that is how to truly and sincerely be present, by learning how to stay in my body and not fly away with my fears when things get uncomfortable.

The room always knows.

The first thing performing teaches us is that an audience is an instrument we cannot deceive.

Most audiences are genuinely generous and want us to do well. That’s true regardless of whether it’s on a stage, behind a rostrum at a conference, or at the front of a meeting room. Sure, there’s the occasional jerk who feels differently, but they’re fewer in number than we might expect.

Audiences are sensitive to authenticity, and they register inauthenticity fast.

We very quickly learn the difference between being present and just pretending to be. Performed presence, where someone has learned their lines and delivers them according to their own pace and not in tune with the audience vibe, is slightly too smooth, slightly managed, the edges too clean. And it feels fake.

Genuine presence is different. It allows us to be a bit uncertain, and to pause while what we’ve just said permeates and the audience settles again.

It allows us to ad lib a little, to go off on a tangent we feel emerging, and end up somewhere unexpected. When we’re fully present and responding to how people are receiving us, the room relaxes. People lean in and they want more of us.

I try and bring this to my professional work in both communications and mental health training. The people we talk to in the work we do are reading us more accurately than we know, and they can tell whether the signal is honest, or if you’re trying to pull one over them. And I love that.

Recovery, with commentary.

The second thing performing taught me is how to recover when I stumble, which I do, for I am but a mere human.

Things go wrong on stage, and regularly. I might lose the thread of a story, or skip over a section accidentally and have to quickly think on my feet about how to narratively time travel back and then time travel forwards again to catch up (as happened a couple of times in my recent shows at the Adelaide Fringe festival).

Sometimes an anecdote or joke is met with silence. Or I forget, mid-sentence, where I was going.

I’ve found that naming the stumble honestly tends to work better than rushing past it or pretending it didn’t happen.

‘That was so funny in my head, I’ll work on delivering it better tomorrow, and thank you for unintentionally giving me that direct feedback’ with a wry and honest smile.

The audience relaxes. The self-consciousness in the room dissolves. Because the performer just did the human thing: acknowledged what’s actually happening.

This is what recovery looks like in ordinary life too.

It’s rarely a smooth comeback. And self-flagellation is damaging and distancing.

We can just acknowledge that something didn’t go as planned, and that’s ok, so let’s continue. The honesty is far more settling and lets people breathe and smile, perhaps even give you the laugh you didn’t get a moment earlier.

Presence without performance.

The third thing is discovering that the goal on stage is never to appear calm… it’s to be present enough that calm becomes completely unnecessary.

When we’re genuinely present and connected with the audience, paying attention to them and where they’re at instead of our own internal management, something shifts. The self-consciousness recedes, the gap closes.

This is what I try to bring into my professional work. Putting attention outward towards the room I’m in, the people in it, how they’re receiving me, and what they’re showing in their face and body language.

Focussing on what’s actually happening, rather than what I wish was happening.

It doesn’t always work, and some days I’m managing rather than being fully present. But I know the difference now, and I know which one serves me and others better.

That knowledge came from the stage as much as anywhere else, and I love that I get to keep learning, connecting, and growing through doing something I really enjoy.

Three things to try.

1. Read the room before you try to change it.

Before your next significant conversation, spend sixty seconds attending to the people in it. Not preparing your opening. Just noticing: what’s the energy here? Who seems tense? Who seems open? Let what you notice decide how you begin.

2. Name the stumble.

Next time something goes a bit wobbly in a conversation, own it. ‘That sounded a bit different to what I meant it to’, or ‘I thought that’d make a better impression, sorry’. The less we armour over the stumble, the more human the exchange becomes.

3. Focus your attention outward.

In your next longish conversation, notice a moment where you’re tempted to monitor how you’re coming across, and redirect that attention to the other person (or people). What are their faces and body language saying? What are they not quite saying? Presence isn’t a feeling we generate. It’s attention we direct.

My jaw was clenched for about three months before I noticed it.

A low, persistent tightness I’d gotten so used to that I’d stopped registering it. The tightness had become the normal level of how things felt.

I was in a period of high pressure at work. Functioning fine by most external measures. Showing up, producing, staying professional. What I wasn’t doing was listening to the thing my body had been trying to tell me for weeks.

By the time I finally paid attention, the jaw had been joined by a tightness across the chest, a slightly elevated pace in everything I did, and a quality in meetings that someone close to me eventually named, carefully, as ‘harder to reach than usual.’

Why we stop listening.

Most of us don’t decide to ignore signals from our bodies. We just get busy, and the signals get quieter, and we stop checking. And that’s where we can run into problems.

Our stress response moves faster than conscious thought. The muscle tension, the shallow breathing, the elevated heart rate, all of it arrives before awareness does. By the time we register ‘I’m stressed’, our body has already been carrying it for some time.

Which means it isn’t weakness to notice, as it’s data. And ignoring it doesn’t make us more professional or capable or tough. It actually means we’re making decisions, running meetings, and managing people on incomplete information. Which is poor business practice, in any other context.

What it costs, and where.

What unprocessed stress does to the people around us was part of an earlier issue:

Calm, mostly.

The weather in the room

I’ve started doing a test on myself. Not often, just when I remember to…

Read more

6 months ago · 1 like · JC Clapham

The short version: they feel it before you do, and they start self-editing. The team member who holds back the question. The colleague who reads the room and decides today isn’t the day. That’s not their problem to manage, it’s ours.

What that earlier piece didn’t get into is where the problem actually starts. Not in the room, but in the body, weeks before we walk in.

The good news is that the body is also where it’s most fixable, and much earlier in the chain than we might think.

This is how.

A body-first check.

This doesn’t require a retreat, a meditation app, or a significant chunk of time. It’s just 30 seconds of honest attention, and then one small physical act.

The attention is a quick internal review: is my jaw clenched or loose, are my shoulders up or down, is my chest tight or open, is my breath shallow or full?

We’re just noticing, not fixing, because this is data collection. We can’t adjust what we haven’t acknowledged.

Then, the small physical act we do next is a breath.

Two short inhales through the nose, followed by one long slow exhale through the mouth, for ten seconds all up.

Most people feel a shift straight away. It’s a helpful interruption, which is often enough to change how you feel walking into the next meeting or conversation.

Doing this before something significant costs nothing at all, and takes so little time. But done consistently, it changes the quality of your presence in ways people feel before they can explain them.

The jaw tension took me three months to become aware of.

That’s how good we get at ignoring the signal. And we wouldn’t make decisions in any other context without checking the instruments first. This is just learning to include ourselves in that practice.

The checking, adjusting, and relaxing of my jaw took me thirty seconds.

The gap between those two numbers is embarrassingly enormous.
But you don’t let it be that big for you.

Three things to try.

1. Run the check.
Before a significant conversation or meeting today or tomorrow, do a quick sweep.
Jaw: clenched or loose?
Shoulders: up or down?
Chest: tight or open?
Breath: shallow or full?
Just noticing it for now.

2. Try the reset breath.
When you do notice tension:
Two short inhales through the nose (a small sniff, then a deeper one), followed by one long slow exhale through the mouth.
Repeated for ten seconds. Most people feel a shift straight away.

3. Find the pattern.
Identify one physical thing you do when you’re under pressure.
Raised shoulder, clenched jaw, held breath.
Once a day, deliberately release it to interrupt the loop.
The body, given the chance, will take the cue from there.

At some point during a difficult stretch a few years back, I stopped making plans.

I didn’t cancel everything or announce I was withdrawing. I just quietly stopped initiating, stopped booking things, kept saying ‘maybe’ to invitations until maybe became ‘no’. I told myself I was managing priorities, being realistic, not getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t notice I’d done it until a friend asked if I was okay, and I realised I’d been isolating for months.

That particular habit, putting yourself on hold until something else is sorted out, is so common and so quiet that most of us don’t recognise it while we’re doing it.

At the time, it feels like sensible triage. But underneath it’s usually something else: a belief that life, properly enjoyed and fully inhabited, is something that happens after.

After the thing is dealt with.
After the relationship repairs.
After the situation settles.

After.

The problem is that ‘after’ rarely arrives the way we imagine it. And while we’re waiting, we’re not the only ones who notice we’ve stepped away.

Postponement as a way of staying in it.

Postponement, in its quieter form, is a way of staying connected with the difficult thing. By treating it as so significant that life itself must wait, we give the situation a kind of power. There’s something in the postponement that says: I am not moving on.

Carrying on, by contrast, can feel like a betrayal. Like you’re saying the thing doesn’t matter, like you’re getting ahead of yourself.

But carrying on is not the same as giving up. It’s not pretending things are fine. It’s choosing to remain alive in your own life while the difficult thing is still there.

That’s not avoidance. That’s steadiness.

The people close to us feel it too.

When we’re in holding mode, not quite present but not quite absent either, the people around us pick up on it. Not always consciously. They feel it in the quality of our attention, in the flatness behind the functioning, in the sense that we’re somewhere else even when we’re in the room.

And often, without being told anything, they feel subtly responsible. They infer that things must be serious. They start treading carefully. They carry a small weight they didn’t ask for and don’t know how to put down.

So when we carry on, when we make a plan and keep it, or laugh at something that’s actually funny, or show up with our attention actually here, we’re not just doing something for ourselves. We’re releasing the people around us from something they’ve been quietly holding.

What it actually looks like.

It’s not performing happiness. It doesn’t require pretending. It’s smaller and quieter than that.

It looks like making a plan for next weekend. Going to see something you’ve been meaning to see. Laughing at something that’s actually funny. Cooking a proper meal. Having a conversation that has nothing to do with the difficult thing.

In December 2022, a relationship had ended a little while earlier and I was not in good shape. A friend had invited me to their annual pre-Christmas dinner, a big warm gathering of people who mostly knew each other well. I spent the entire day trying to talk myself out of going.

The story I was telling myself was specific: that I was a pity invite, that I’d be the sad person everyone had to be careful around, that showing up in that state, to something that festive, would make me a burden and the evening worse.

The generous interpretation of this is that I was being considerate. The honest one is that I was considering using it as a reason to stay home, with my sadness for company.

At some point in the late afternoon, I gave myself a pep talk, made a dessert, put on a good shirt, packed some non-alcoholic beers, and went. I nearly turned around several times on the drive. But I kept going, got there, and… had a nice kind of fun.

I met people I hadn’t met before.
I laughed at things that were actually funny, said some things that made others laugh.
I ate well and felt, for a few hours, like a person who was still part of things. Nobody was careful around me, and nobody needed to be.

That friendship has since faded, the way some do. But something from that evening stayed. A small piece of evidence that I could show up before I was ready, and that doing so was exactly what would help me feel ready next time.

The difficult thing was still there on the drive home. But I was better able to observe it and not be captured by it. I arrived home, to the still-present challenge, slightly differently than I’d left.

That’s what carrying on actually is: not triumph, and not pretending.
Just returning to your own life before the difficult thing gives you permission to.

Three things to try.

1. Book the thing.
Identify one thing you’ve been postponing until things feel more settled.
Book it, plan it, or do it this week.
You don’t have to feel ready. The point is returning to your own life before it’s resolved.

2. Notice the difference between functioning and being present.
Functioning is going through the motions. Present means your attention is actually here: in the conversation, in the meal, in the walk.
Pick one moment today and try to be in it, rather than get through it.

3. Take stock at the end of the week.
Ask: what did I do this week that was just for me, or just for the pleasure of it?
If the answer is nothing, that’s information.
Carry on. Not because things are sorted, but because you’re still here.

There’s a particular kind of distress that feels completely present-tense, and isn’t. But we mistake it for the present.

Something happens: someone doesn’t respond when we expected them to, or we get deprioritised in a small but noticeable way, or there’s a silence where we thought there’d be a sound. And our nervous system doesn’t just register it and move on… it floods us.

Our chest might tighten, thoughts race, adrenaline pumping.

Already three steps ahead. Building a case about what this means, what it says, and what comes next.

From the outside, this can look like an overreaction. From the inside, it can feel like an accurate reading of the situation.

That gap is the problem.

What I’ve learned through therapy, study, and paying attention to myself when I’d rather look away, is that the intensity of the flood is hardly ever about the thing that just happened.

Most of the time, it’s really about everything that came before it. Previous times that felt similar, and which our body and mind tell us is happening again.

Old wounds leave bruises. New events can match those previous wounds closely enough to set the same alarm off. And the alarm doesn’t care about the difference between then and now, it just fires. That’s its job: to warn us that something we didn’t like might be happening again.

In that moment, it can feel like you’re drowning in three centimetres of water.

Why turning outward doesn’t help.

For a long time, my response to this was to do what the alarm told me to: monitor. Wait, scan for signals, look for evidence that the thing I feared was either happening or not.

The problem is that when we’re looking outward for confirmation that something is wrong now, just like it was in the past, we’re running the alarm whether we need to or not.

We stay in the heightened state and tend to interpret everything through the same fearful lens, which means we’re not actually reading the present situation at all. We’re just finding the past in it.

There was a period not long ago when someone close to me went quiet in a way that felt familiar. Not a fight, not a clear thing I could point to. Just a shift in temperature. A message left on read, a plan that didn’t come together. And something in me responded as though I already knew exactly what it meant, as though the situation had already been decided and I was just waiting for confirmation.

I began composing responses to things that hadn’t been said yet. Already defensive, already hurt, already somewhere ahead of the actual moment.

What was actually happening was ordinary, as it turned out. Life, tiredness, bad timing. But my alarm had matched the bruise of something older, and I was already halfway through a reaction to that older thing before the present one had even been resolved.

The gap between what was happening and what I was feeling was enormous, and I only noticed it when I put the phone down and went and did something else.

What tends to help, I’ve found, is that moment of deliberate stepping back. Not analysing the situation, not building a case. Just noticing that the alarm has fired, and asking whether it’s responding to right now, or to something older.

What turning inward actually looks like.

What I’ve been trying to do instead, and this is genuinely a practice and not a resolution, is turn back toward myself.

I’ve started taking 20 minutes. To do something I was going to do before the alarm went off. Not to distract, and not to prove a point.

But because we tend to feel more settled when we’re living our own lives with some intention, rather than waiting for external confirmation that things are fine. When I do what I said I’d do, something small but real registers: I can rely on myself. That accumulates, slowly, into something that outside signals can’t completely undo.

The walk. The study time. The meal we actually cook instead of ordering in, or not eating. The message we write to someone we love. The book we open, even for twenty minutes.

These are not fillers while we wait to feel better… they are what better is made of.

The other thing that helps, and this one is smaller but I’ve found it true: a phrase short enough to say in a breath.

I’m here.

Not as an affirmation in the poster-on-the-wall sense. Just felt. And said while I do something physical: feet on the floor, a long exhale, the moment of moving from one room to another. Over time, the two things bind together and the phrase starts to work faster.

The flood still comes, as old injuries don’t disappear because we’ve named them.

But our response can change and reflect the present rather than the past. And for anyone who’s been flooded, that’s safety and calm.

Three things to try.

1. Don’t get sideswiped.

   Next time you notice the flood starting, before you reach for the phone or start composing a message in your head, do one small thing you were already planning to do that day first. See what it does to the feeling.

2. Try the phrase “I’m here.”

   Just quietly, to yourself, attached to something physical: the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning, or a long breath before you walk into a room. I’m here. See how it feels.

3. Map it.

   Think back to the last time you were flooded by something that probably didn’t deserve the intensity. Not to relitigate it, but to ask: what did the situation remind you of? What older version of this have you lived before?
   See if you can name it. Knowing where the alarm was built doesn’t stop it firing, but it does make the noise a little less convincing.